


Outside of Time

by PeniG



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Blasphemy, Body Horror, Chapters 5 6 and 8 are messy, Death, Execution, Gen, Job satisfaction, Mass Death, Mutilation, Pre-Fall (Good Omens), Pre-Fall Crowley (Good Omens), Rebellion, Revolution, Riots, The demons will have angel names and you'll figure them out or you won't, Torture, Violence, War in Heaven (Good Omens), What are angels supposed to do all day anyhow?, all will be revealed in later chapters, always a risk in this fandom, archives and libraries, creating Hell, cw: Sandalphon, cw: War, cw: violence, everybody has PTSD and nobody knows what that is, inventing the military, only ever asked questions, true form horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:34:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23208589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: God is infinite, her creations finite, and any concept small enough for a creation’s mind to hold is necessarily too small to approximate reality. Hence ineffability is born with Lucifer and language. One must speak imperfectly, or be silent.Gadreel was not/is not/will never be good at silence. Meanwhile, a happy little principality is having a tickety-boo time. Change is afoot, but how can Heaven change? Half of Heaven goes on strike. Gadreel gets depressed. God doesn’t seem to notice anything wrong. Lucifer tries to make Her notice.Aziraphale holds a door, and accidentally makes a flaming sword. Gadreel does not fight in the long night that will be known as The War. Aziraphale becomes a soldier. Because somebody has to. Gadreel becomes Crawly, Satan’s little pet snake; but how much of that is who he is, and how much is who he pretends to be? How long until he can no longer tell the difference, himself? The final pieces are placed. The Human Project goes live. Time begins.
Relationships: Crowley & Satan | Lucifer (Good Omens)
Comments: 108
Kudos: 87





	1. On Holiday

**Author's Note:**

> As per the source material, some angel/demon names are drawn from real lore and some are pulled semi-randomly out of the air. Sex is still in the process of invention and gender isn't even a twinkle in God's eye, but in the case of characters for whom I used gendered pronouns in The Akashic Records I used the same one. Everyone else will be "it" if I can keep that straight. Time isn't running on earth yet and it only exists just enough in Heaven to prevent everything from happening at once so if prolonged use of narrative present tense bugs you, you've been warned.
> 
> Prequel to The Akashic Records, but should be readable independently.
> 
> All narrators are unreliable.

Gadreel has never had a body, as it will later be understood, and what will someday be known as his True Form exists in too many dimensions to describe in English; but for the sake of speaking of him (It? They? Whatever.) at all let us use clumsy metaphors involving trailing robelike stuff instead of legs and feet, a great many hands for manipulating the range of matter from atoms to stars, and Vantablack wings from which he has never been able to clean all the stardust. He smells colors in his eyes, tastes light on his fingers, hears the vibrations of the universe in his heart. And so on. This is all normal.

He watches with satisfaction as the dynamic system of the cosmos is set into motion, its actions and reactions sufficient to maintain and mend and even create its elements anew without further angelic intervention. The work crews and design teams disperse on holiday, taking the chance to socialize and relax with the circles of friends they made on the job. Gadreel, who worked on more different teams and more different projects than any other starmaker, has a wide acquaintance, but none of the dispersing groups contains him, somehow. That’s all right. None attracts him. He’s tired - this is the first rest he’s ever had - and he finds a breezy colorful corner of Heaven in which to kick back and process his existence.

(He loves colors. Red is his favorite, but they’re all good. Heaven is full of the light of God and angelic auras, and therefore of color.)

The concept of time exists, being necessary for the physical universe to function as envisioned, and in fact Gadreel, like all starmakers, has a certain amount of control of it to facilitate his work, but it doesn’t apply in Heaven, and even among the stars is elastic. So let us call the period he spends lolling around on his own thinking about nothing in particular “about a week.” After that he gets restless and takes a grand tour of “a few months,” riding the solar winds of different systems, checking out points of interest he had to hurry past when he was on the job, poking among the more impressive stars and nebulae and planets he didn’t work on, to see how they were done. Because he has worked on so many different projects, and when not working hung about watching other people work, sneaking looks at the design documents, and experimenting on his own, the finished stars have nothing truly new to show him. He’s a bit smug about how often his solution to the Multi Star Problem was implemented by teams he wasn’t on, but none of them seem to have refined it much, or added any interesting bells and whistles. _When I solve a problem, it stays solved,_ he thinks, with satisfaction; but also with disappointment. He wishes he didn’t have to say that to himself; that someone else would notice and say it to him.

He’s hungry.

Though angels will always have a lot of leeway in how they sustain themselves, all of creation requires nourishment. Gadreel has existed on a steady diet of learning, beauty, and praise since his creation, but now he has learned all he can about stars and viewed all the beauty of the universe, and is doing nothing worthy of praise. Or blame. Or notice of any kind.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is lonely, rather than hungry; but both are human concepts and neither covers his state. He needs what he does not get, and wants what is not made available. This should not be possible in Heaven, but notions of possible and impossible have hitherto been irrelevant so Gadreel does not think in those terms; does not consider that other angels might be in similar straits; does not ponder any larger implications.

Instead he pokes his metaphorical nose into spaces where he has no business. The plant workshops make extensive use of novel states of familiar matter - liquid ice, solid minerals, gaseous oxygen compounds - which is fascinating; but the archangel in charge catches him trying to take cuttings and growth matrix to experiment with for himself and chases him out empty-handed. He manages to spend quite awhile in the Animalcula Workshop, where a minor angel is happy to show off how well reproduction by cell division is coming along, but when a feud develops between two designers and their respective build teams over the relative merits of cilia versus pseudopodia for locomotion, he questions both sides until the foreman blames him for the increasing heat of the situation and evicts him, which is blatantly unfair.

(Gadreel carries blame for a lot of things, not _one_ of which - he would be happy to explain to anyone who would listen, which has always been no one - has _ever_ been _his fault_. How had he been supposed to know that Zikiel would be so rigid about comet design? No one is _using_ those cuttings. And he’s only trying to _understand_ the argument, not get either side all het up!)

He decides to keep a low profile, slinking from workshop to workshop, from station to station. Even the simplest looking animals have hundreds of moving parts, hard and soft, all put together in a bewildering variety of shapes and colors and chemical compositions, making the heavenly spheres seem embarrassingly basic. No one workman seems to grasp more than is necessary for their own projects and the design teams are far more cagey with their specifications and plans than the star designers ever were, so sooner or later questions leak inexorably out of him, at which point he must ask quickly in order to get any answers before he’s ejected as a nuisance.

So Gadreel strikes up after-hours acquaintances with angels he can pump. He feeds them attention, they give him sips of information. That’s fair, isn’t it? It’s hit-or-miss how satisfying this is; but it beats heading over to the Choirs near Araboth, the Dwellingplace of God, and dining on celestial harmonies, which Gadreel finds tasteless after the fizzing popping dynamic nourishment he used to get, playing his part in creation.

Which is why he’s (metaphorically) sitting with Orista, the cherub in charge of shuffling documents between workshops and conference rooms, on the (metaphorical) Main Promenade. Orista isn’t the brightest flame in the celestial sky, but he’s all right. He knows everybody, and always has a messenger bag weighted down with specs and memos and plans that he’s always getting muddled, and is happy to let Gadreel unmuddle them, without fussing about how much looking inside them Gadreel needs to do in the process. He gets told off for delivering the wrong thing to the wrong place a lot less since he took up with Gadreel, and Gadreel gets an unsystematic grasp of how the Eden Project’s developing that’s enough to sustain him. A walled laboratory, an endlessly complicated interlocking web of life forms, concepts like “ecology” and “species;” it’s cool, if a bit messy, and hard to make sense of when viewed in bits and pieces, but he's making progress.  
  
“A whole new workshop, for one kind of primate?” Gadreel remarks, not expecting Orista to know anything. “That seems a bit much.”

 _“Put that back!_ ” Orista, usually so mellow, reaches over to shove the specs back into the bag. “It’s not just a new primate, it’s a new _concept_. Very big deal, the Human Project.”

“New concept my arse,” says Gadreel, rolling the rubber band down the cylinder of plans. (No one has an arse, or a rubber band, but you get the idea.) “I may not be a lifemaker, but I know a primate when I see the schematics for one.”

Orista jerks the roll out of his hands. “Some special _kind_ of primate! I dunno, do I? I just deliver ‘em. The workshop’s got guard cherubim all ‘round it and God is supervising personally.”

“Oh, really? Where is this workshop?”

“Over near Araboth.” Orista shoves the plans back into his bag. “And don’t even think about nosing around. Cherubim, remember? You don’t mess with us.”

“Yeah, yeah, cherubim, I hear you.” All cherubim, in Gadreel’s experience, are stupid. Not all as stupid as Orista, who is in a class by himself, but plenty stupid enough. Strong, too, able to haul things like gigantic messenger bags around as if they were nothing, and swat harder than anything ever needs swatting, plus the multiple heads make sneaking past them tricky; but things that are too easy are _boring_ , and Gadreel already has half a dozen vague ideas for getting into this mysterious new shop, which will no doubt solidify when he sees the setup for himself. Time to trot out the idea he has been saving for the next time Orista needs distracting, which appears to have arrived. “You know what this bag needs? More compartments. It’ll be a lot harder for you to mix up the marsupial specs with aquatic fowl specs if they're in separate compartments.”

Orista looks puzzled, so Gadreel demonstrates, dividing the interior of the bag and organizing the contents. Orista gets bored, looks around the Promenade, and waves at a passing gaggle of angels - including seraphim, cherubim, archangels, a throne or two, and principalities - all orbiting a common center. “Hey, Orista,” booms a voice that is simultaneously loud and deep, and light and sweet, the second most recognizable voice in Heaven. Gadreel looks up, startled. His heart would skip a beat, if he had one.

“Hey, Lucifer,” Orista answers. “Hey, Zaphiel! Hey, Belial!” And by that time the shining shimmering group has passed by.

“You know Lucifer?” Gadreel, hands full of specs, watches them go.

“Everybody knows Lucifer,” says Orista, which is true. 

“But he said hi to you first,” Gadreel points out.

“I’m on his quidditch team,” says Orista.

Don’t tie yourself into knots envisioning Celestial Quidditch. It’s another clumsy metaphor for a pastime as much more complex and ethereal than quidditch as quidditch would be more complex and magical than a footrace. Gadreel dislikes the sport, because its rules are arbitrary and he can never watch a match without thinking of a dozen or more ways to accomplish the putative goals more elegantly; plus something about the way the teams go after each other sets his metaphorical teeth on edge. But other angels like it and anyway - _Lucifer said hello_. To _Orista._

“That’s nice,” Gadreel says.

“We’re all getting together at the Font later,” says Orista. “After I do these rounds. You should come with.”

Gadreel swallows. “All right. I don’t mind. Nothing better to do.”

Heaven is not hierarchical. All angels have their work (except when between jobs) and all the work is important, and all angels are equal. They have qualities which make them different, and _yes_ , some of them interact directly with God more often (a lot more often) than others, but that doesn’t make them more _important_. There is no reason for one angel to be particularly impressed by, or contemptuous of, any other angel.

But - _Lucifer_.

The First Angel. The Lightbringer. The Morning Star. All white radiance and red highlights. The most beautiful, at all levels of perception and to all available senses, among over thirty million beautiful entities. God doesn’t play favorites, but Lucifer _is_ Her favorite, the one She communicates with directly the most often, the one who is always welcome at Her Throne or where ever else She’s manifesting, the best informed, most gracious, most brilliant creation in the Universe.

No, whatever Lucifer plans to do at the Font with that cross-section of Heaven trailing after him, Gadreel has nothing whatever better to do than it.

He accompanies Orista on his rounds, helping him figure out how to use the compartments to best effect, and incidently learning the location of the Human Project workshop, which is much, much closer to Araboth than any other workshop has ever been. The cherubim look competent, too, and the aura of Restricted Access would have prompted him to accept the challenge of getting a look around even had his curiosity not already been piqued. 

He has no fear of God. How could he? God is God, the Creator, the Wellspring of Grace. No one has ever known God to be angry. 

The gathering round the Font is a brilliant one - literally. The seraphim burn as brightly as the leaping waters, and everywhere are glittering eyes, shining wings, gleaming visages, all clustered around Lucifer, burning brightest of all. The forms and voices gathered here are a feast of beauty sufficient to feed a dozen hungry workmen. Gadreel feels like a dark cloud, absorbing the light of the firmament, trailing in Orista’s wake as they approach; and perhaps he is; perhaps it is because he is a humble, hungry darkness in the midst of plenteous light that Lucifer asks, on greeting Orista with the celestial equivalent of a high five: “Who’s your little friend, then?”

“Oh, this is Gadreel,” says Orista. “He’s been keeping me company on my rounds while he’s between jobs.”

“Between jobs, eh?” Lucifer looks Gadreel over with a benign smile. “Stars, or planets?”

“ _Zgp_ ,” says Gadreel, his communication systems jamming under the tingling glory of the Morning Star’s attention. “Both. And, um, nebulae. Turn my hand to anything, really.”

“I see. Anything to do with Earth?”

Gadreel shrugs, striving not to fall all over himself striving to impress someone he could not, logically, impress in any way. “This and that, you know. But since the lands rose and the waters were divided, there hasn’t been anything for me, for us, to do. So I’m on holiday.”

“On holiday.” Lucifer’s beautiful voice rolls the words over, and they seem faintly ridiculous. “Enjoying yourself, then?”

“Oh, sure,” says Gadreel, mentally flipping through the catalog of his recent activities, looking for something, _anything,_ he’s done lately that might interest Lucifer, and coming up short. “Looking around. Relaxing.”

“I thought all the starmakers were recalled to sing around the Throne,” says a cherub.

“Only the seraphim,” says Dagiel, one of the more relaxed of that choir. “A lot of the other ranks have washed up there voluntarily, for lack of anything else to do, but they haven’t been recalled.”

“Well, they’ve earned a rest, I suppose,” says Lucifer. “But of course we’re made to serve, and the rest of Heaven is busy enough. Odd this bunch should be left at loose ends. Any idea when you’ll be reassigned, Gadreel? Or what you’ll be reassigned to? There must be rumors.”

If there are, Gadreel isn’t in any gossip circles to hear them, not that he’s about to admit that with so many illustrious eyes turned his way. “I haven’t heard anything that sounds plausible. I suppose we’ll be needed on the Eden Project, eventually.”

“Ah, yes, the Eden Project. Far more interesting than anything going on in Heaven, lately.” Lucifer sounds amused. “And yet nobody knows what, exactly, it’s about.”

“It’s about _creation_ , Lucifer,” sighs Michael.

Gadreel hasn’t even noticed Michael, before. Her style of beauty is less radiant than Lucifer’s; not modest, but somehow less overt. She carries herself more like a cherub than like an archangel, and if she’s looked at Gadreel at all, Gadreel has not noticed it.

Lucifer rolls his eyes. “ _Of course_ it’s about creation, but what’s with the abrupt change of scale? Are we to be set to building all these fiddly bits on every planet in creation? Why is everything suddenly so physical? She won’t explain _any_ of it.”

“Why should She?”

“Why _shouldn’t_ She?”

No one is looking at Gadreel anymore. He sits at the edge of the group, tuning out the quidditch talk Orista’s gotten into in favor of listening to the music of Lucifer’s voice discussing recent developments in creation, inviting speculation on the reasons for recent policy changes and rearrangements of priorities. Michael seems set on undercutting every point he makes, taking the (boring) position that they all have their jobs to do (“Not the starmakers! Not anymore!”) and will understand the context when God decides to reveal Her Creative Vision to the multitudes. Lucifer contends that the sooner everyone understands the Vision the more effectively they’ll be able to solve the practical problems of implementation. Belial, the seraph in charge of the Flying Insect Workshop, agrees vigorously and brings up a number of examples of projects stalled on precisely this issue, holding in limbo waiting for clarification, so that Michael _should_ be routed; but Michael, who has no experience at all with physical creation, refuses to be routed. The fascinating argument ends only when the quidditch conversation generates an attempt to recreate an impressive move Gabriel pulled off last game, which goes spectacularly wrong and ends with Orista and Gabriel landing in the Font, generating laughter all around.

The gathering breaks up, the archangels wandering off wing-in-wing in perfect amity and the others dispersing according to their kinds, many of them off to start their shifts in their choir or whatever workshop they’re in. Gadreel stays seated on the edge of the basin, comfortably full for the first time in “days,” enjoying the bubbling sensation every time his mind returns to the fact of being noticed by Lucifer. Ever since his holiday began, people who notice him without his calling attention to himself have done so in order to tell him to go away, and if he doesn’t make himself sufficiently pleasant and helpful when he _does_ call attention to himself, he’s eventually told to go away anyhow. Nor does anyone seem to appreciate it when he’s pleasant and helpful. 

But Lucifer noticed him, just for existing in the same space. Lucifer took an interest in him. If Gadreel’d had anything actually interesting to say...

Well, next time, he _will._

And there _will_ be a next time!

Gadreel watches the Font and listens to the chiming voices of dominations practicing their harmonies, planning how to be interesting, for “several hours.” Then, he sets about implementing these plans.

The Human Project Workshop proves a tough nut to crack. The guarding cherubim are stupid, yes, but they are also steadfast. There’s no talking to them while they’re on duty, and when he catches one off-duty, it turns out to be a waste of time - they never see inside the shop. The workers seem to be mostly seraphim and thrones, with whom he has little in common and therefore not much excuse to strike up a conversation, but he can hang out a bit, keep his eyes open, notice where they go and what they get up to off-duty. Something will turn up. He only needs patience and persistence.

The other workshops seem like small potatoes in contrast to the mystery of the Human Project, but he hangs about anyhow, picking up a little here, a little there. The angel who designed snakes is taking flack from the Invertebrates Team and is eager to explain to anyone who will sit still all the ways in which they are _not_ plagiarizing worms. Orista’s delivery of waterfowl plans to the Marsupial Workshop has wonderfully hilarious results; not that Orista gets the joke. And now that he’s directing his attention outward in a more purposeful way than before, Gadreel has a feeling that he’s close to Something, and it nags at him. Something he senses more vaguely than he’s used to sensing things. Something that’s always there, but that neither he nor anybody else has noticed yet.

Something? Someone? He’s not sure. He’s not even sure how to speak of it.

Lucifer is relaxing at the Font while his friends mill about. Michael and their cherub friend Zaphiel challenge all comers to a contest of strength, with much laughing on all sides. Gadreel’s not in their weight class, and knows it, and doesn’t care much, but he cheers for Belial, Dagiel, and Orista against them, and lounges in Lucifer’s shadow. Like all shadows in Heaven it’s pale and diffuse, with a head for every light source - and almost everything is a light source. The shadow is what makes the idea click for him, giving him words to speak, and once he has the words, they must come out. None of the emotions that enable others to speak up around the Morning Star are necessary to Gadreel. The words have their own motive power. “D’jever notice,” he says, loud enough for Lucifer and Lucifer alone to hear amid the shouts and cheers and laughter and echoes of celestial song surrounding them, “that there’s something underneath?”

Lucifer looks down with a smile as beautiful as the swirling firmament. “Oh, hello Gadreel,” he says, though it’s been plenty long enough for him to have forgotten the name. “Underneath what?”

Gadreel gestures with one of his many graceful hands. “Everything. Heaven. Something behind the light and the motion. Something dark and still.”

“What, like - space?”

Gadreel shrugs. “Space isn’t still, not really. It’s full of solar winds and gravity and, and pressure. Even vacuum has its own dynamic. This is the opposite of all that.”

“Surely the opposite of space is matter. Or energy. Or - time -“ Lucifer looks thoughtful. “Hmm. But none of those things is the opposite of anything, really.”

“Except this thing I’m sensing, I suppose,” says Gadreel. “ _Can_ something exist without an opposite? One of the first things we learned making stars was, if you didn’t set up opposing forces in balance everything’d fall out of whack and collapse. Can’t have light without darkness or vice versa. But, when you look around here - there’s not nearly enough darkness to balance the light, is there? Not visibly. So it must be where we can’t see it. Mustn’t it?”

Gadreel trails off, aware of Lucifer watching and listening with an expression he can’t quite read, but enjoys anyway.

“You know, you’re the first angel I’ve ever met who’s noticed it,” says Lucifer. “I’ve brought it up to the other archangels, and they don’t know what I’m talking about. I’d begun to think I had some unique sense the rest of you lack. I’ve seen it clearly once - in the first moment of my creation - standing between Mother and the Universe. I thought it was another angel, but - I was the First. And then I turned my face toward Her again, to watch Her create more angels, and I’ve never seen it again. But I’m still aware it’s - somewhere. As you say. _Underneath_.”

“Didn’t you ask Her about it?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“She laughed and said, _All in good time.”_

“Well, _that’s_ useful!” Gadreel regrets the words as soon as they fall out of his mouth. Similar words, in similar tones, have immediately preceded a lot of work team transfers.

Lucifer laughs. “I know, right? Everyone thinks it must be _so nice_ , being the one She walks with and talks with the most. And of course it is, in its way, when She’s not being cryptic! But She’s almost _always_ being cryptic. I understand that some things are easier to show than to explain, and that She doesn’t want to explain the same thing thirty million times, so it’s best to wait for announcements, and I love Her, but - She drives me crazy, sometimes!” He glances over his shoulder, at Michael and Zaphiel laughing as they fend off a team effort by Gabriel, Belial, Dagiel, and Uriel, not noticing the stealth party of two principalities and a dominion circling behind them. “I...would appreciate it if you kept this conversation between the two of us. Michael and Gabriel particularly. They think all I saw was my shadow.”

“Even if it _was_ your shadow, that doesn’t mean that’s _all_ it was,” says Gadreel, swelling inside with the wonder of sharing a confidence with Lucifer. Of understanding him, or part of him, better than the other archangels do. “If it’s your shadow I’m noticing hovering around underneath, then shadows have properties we don’t know about, and that’s worth looking into. If they don’t grasp that, there’s no point talking to them about it.”

Michael and Zaphiel go down under the surprise onslaught of the other angels; but Michael buds out an implement and uses it to leverage one of her assailants into Gabriel, taking them both down long enough for her to surge upright again. Zaphiel grabs one end of the implement to haul himself up, and she snaps it in two to give him the smaller half. He goes back-to-back with her to fend off a fresh assault. Lucifer laughs and applauds, and the conversation is over; but Gadreel replays it in his head many, many times.

The next time he not-quite-accidentally comes across Lucifer, he is in another argument with Michael, who is visibly agitated. “But it’s nonsense! What’s the opposite of an angel, then?”

Lucifer shrugs. “I don’t know. Never seen one. But - theoretically - there ought to be one.”

“Theoretically,” says Gabriel. “That’s absurd. Nothing exists _in theory_! It’s either created or it’s not.”

“Maybe so,” concedes Lucifer. “But - have you seen all creation? I haven’t. If we see something, we can be sure it exists, but if we don’t, that doesn’t prove anything. Angels imply the existence of opposite-angels.”

“No they _don’t_!” Michael’s implement (which she calls a sword and carries everywhere now) clashes against one of her wheels.

“Um,” says Zaphiel. “They might? Balance is a theme in creation.”

“Oh, not you, too!” Michael turns and stomps off. Zaphiel makes an apologetic gesture toward Lucifer and hurries after her. 

Lucifer grins. Gabriel rolls his eyes. “Stop winding her up!”

“I’m not winding her up,” says Lucifer. “If she can’t sustain valid philosophical discussions she should stay out of them.”

“There _are_ no valid philosophical discussions! If we need to know things, God will tell us.”

“She wouldn’t have given us minds if she didn’t expect us to use them.”

“In her service, not to rile each other up. We _know_ you’re smarter than us, all right? You don’t have to rub it in!”

Lucifer laughs, which annoys Gabriel even more, and he stalks away, leaving Lucifer gazing out over the Milky Way. Gadreel has never seen him alone before, and hesitates to approach, until Lucifer, without turning, says: “Hello, Gadreel.”

A greeting’s as good as an invitation, so Gadreel leans on the metaphorical rail beside him and surveys his old workspace, too. “Hello, Lucifer. It looks good, doesn’t it?”

“It does.” Lucifer sounds amused. “You do good work.”

“A lot of us did,” says Gadreel, perfunctorily. “But, yeah, my contribution to the cosmos does not suck.”

Lucifer laughs; a different laugh than the one that annoyed Gabriel, deep and rumbly. “Modesty doesn’t suit you. You should be allowed to take pleasure in your own accomplishments.”

“Oh, I do,” Gadreel admits, feeling warm all over. “But I’m not supposed to admit it, am I? It’s like, there’s a rule about it, only nobody ever says it straight out. Which is weird. How do we _know_ it’s a rule?”

Lucifer is still watching the Milky Way, but he is also watching Gadreel, which makes the smaller angel feel pleasantly twitchy. “I suppose that’s innate. Built into us. So we’ll know how to please Mother.”

“Funny way to do it, though,” says Gadreel. “I mean, knowing I _shouldn’t_ admit to something isn’t as efficient as my not being _able_ to, to feel the thing I’m not admitting, is it? And _why_ shouldn’t I admit it, anyway? God’s pleased with the work, or She wouldn’t have given it the final push to set everything in motion. What’s pleasing to Her should be pleasing to me. So why not say so? Why isn’t everyone going around talking about how good their work is? I don’t see the point of the rule.”

“Neither do I. I think I’ll run that one by Michael, next, see if she fares any better than she does on the question of whether anything can exist without an opposite. You heard her completely losing her cool, there?” Gadreel nods, and basks in the Morning Star’s pleasure in his fellow archangel’s discomfiture. “She can’t resist contradicting me, but she can’t form a coherent argument, either!”

“If she always opposes you, does that make her your opposite?” 

A smile spreads across Lucifer’s countenance; a smile of wonder and delight and some other, smaller emotion that Gadreel doesn’t register enough to put a name to. “It _does_! If angels can be the opposites of each other - _oh ho_! This will tie her in _knots!_ What a clever angel you are!”

“I am, aren’t I?” Gadreel feels as if he’s swelling and glowing, though he knows he remains small and relatively dark compared to Lucifer’s brilliance.

Lucifer’s laugh echoes off the firmament; but soon it’s time for him to join his choir in Araboth singing praises round the Throne and Gadreel is left alone again, giddy and well-fed, but craving More.

He is not the only angel wanting to get close to Lucifer; far from it. If he wants to stand out favorably from the competition, he must take care. So he does not push or show off or make a nuisance of himself - in Lucifer’s line of sight. He has never been afraid of being the nuisance, of calling attention to himself; but fighting to rise in the gravity well of the Lightbringer’s presence is a mug’s game. When Lucifer is around, he is the Center and everyone else is in orbit. He will notice Gadreel, or he will not, and that is not within Gadreel’s control. What _is_ within his control is whether he has anything to say worth being noticed _for._ If that means showing off or pushing or making a nuisance of himself whenever Lucifer isn’t around, well, that’s his natural tendency, anyway.

So he keeps Orista company, and noses into workshops he’s already been kicked out of, and goes to quidditch matches to heckle the players on Michael’s team and cheer those on Lucifer’s, and he pays attention, always on the lookout for the kind of question or observation or random thought that he can drop casually in Lucifer’s hearing and Lucifer can pick up and use to give Michael fits; the one thing he has to offer that Lucifer consistently accepts. 

Other angels notice that Lucifer occasionally addresses Gadreel by name, and invite him to hang out, which is nice. Sometimes they drop into the material plane together and devise games, less arbitrary than quidditch, in which precision control of matter and energy and the solving of puzzles in novel ways are valid routes to victory. “Debate” has also come into fashion as a pastime, verbal sparring ala Lucifer vs. Michael, and Gadreel can more than hold his own among his peers in this. In debate circles, his proclivity for getting thrown out of places is more an asset than a liability, the sign of someone dedicated to the acquisition of knowledge over the following of rules. His holiday becomes more fun than not.

He still can’t get a look in on the Human Project, but he keeps trying, hoping to catch a break, until he catches one.

Its name is Pthaniel, and he worked with it on the Vega system. It comes out of the Human Workshop behind a bunch of seraphim and thrones, looking small and tired. Gadreel hails it casually. “Hey, Pthaniel! Long time no see!” He swoops up next to him, emitting happy recognition. “They’ve got you working again? Good for you! I thought this was a biological workshop, though.”

“It is,” sighs Pthaniel. “I’m mostly cleaning up things. It’s a mess in there.” It sways and smiles feebly.

Gadreel feels a twinge of concern. Pthaniel was one of the quietest, most diligent laborers he’s ever worked alongside, with a tendency to push itself past its limits if not looked out for. He mentally reviews the angel’s preferred nourishments. “You look beat. Want to go soak up some gamma rays?”

“That sounds great,” says Pthaniel, “but I’m not sure I can reach a source right now.”

“Pfft, you leave the transport to me,” says Gadreel. “Hang on.” Hand in hand in hand in hand, they join, and Gadreel leans back and falls into the material plane, dragging Pthaniel with him into the orbit of Sol. They shrug into the semi-material forms they wore as starmakers and coast, tying their trailing robes together to maintain contact, and do not speak until Pthaniel has absorbed enough light and radiation to perk up a bit. 

Gadreel has almost forgotten, after so much time in Heaven, how heady more material nourishment is. They are both relaxed and pleasantly buzzed when Pthaniel says: “Thanks, Gadreel. I hadn’t realized how worn out I was.”

“You never do,” says Gadreel. “Your team leader should’ve sent you out ages ago.”

“I don’t really have a team leader, is the thing,” says Pthaniel. “It’s all early development in there, lots of design and testing of individual components. I was only brought in to clean up, recycle and purify and so on, and work kept on around me, so as soon as I cleared one area another lot would be swept off the table in another part of the shop. I only got caught up because somebody in the design team had a paradigm shift and they’ve been on the drawing boards instead of modeling. It’ll be a mess again, soon, but maybe they’ll scoop up a different angel next time.”

“Not a permanent assignment, then, just, you were handy?”

“That’s right. I think I was the first idle angel Gabriel saw after he got the call. I don’t mind, really, only - it was a two-angel job by the time they got anyone on it.”

“You should’ve said something! They’d’ve got you a workmate if you’d asked.”

Pthaniel shrugs. “I got stuck in doing the work and didn’t think of it.” It turns and spreads its arms, absorbing a new burst of rays and trilling contentedly. “So what’ve you been doing?”

“Bugger all,” Gadreel admits. “It was nice for awhile, but even cleanup sounds good to me right now; in a special lab like that one, for choice. What is _up_ with that place, anyhow? It seems like a lot of fuss and experts and secrecy for a single primate.”

“A single what?”

“Primate. Type of biological thingy, animal, one of the self-mobile small scale creations for living on planets. Bilateral symmetry, central nervous system, social, environment manipulating. At least, that’s what I thought they were working on in there. Why, what did you see instead?”

“I suppose it could be a creation like that. Once it’s all put together. The teams are still hashing out the operating systems and they kept complaining that the design parameters are all in conflict.”

“Like how?”

“Well - I didn’t really understand it all -“

“Did you _try_?”

“Um, not as such. I was busy, and it’s a bit complicated for me. I’m not smart like you.”

“You’re not still fretting about what Uriel said to you that time, are you? You’re _thorough_ , not _stupid_. Nobody ever has to go back and do your work over again, which is more than I can say for Uriel! I bet you saw a bunch of stuff that you haven’t had time to put together in your mind, and once you have it all systematized, you’ll know more about the Human Project as a whole than anybody in there working on it does.”

Pthaniel laughs. “Why do you care?”

“Why do I ever care? I’ve been sniffing around all the workshops and this one is weird and you’re the only person I know who might condescend to give me hints! And anyway you shouldn’t go around thinking you’re stupid because _it isn’t true_. I don’t have to care particularly to know _that!_ I _know_ you know more than you think you do! What parameters are in conflict?”

“Well...okay, but remember, I haven’t been in any bio workshops but this one so I don’t know the jargon. You know what a brain is?”

“The most central part of a central nervous system. A kind of shared locus for power and knowledge, runs all the moving parts and makes decisions. All the more complicated animals have them.”

“Well, apparently this one’s more complicated than the others. The brain is, God’s being very picky about it. Bigger for its size than necessary, according to the skeleton teams -“

“Wait, there’s more than one skeleton team? I thought the basics of endoskeletons had already been hashed out. The vertebrate teams are all working off a standard template.”

“I don’t know anything about that. The Human Project has a team each for Locomotion, Manipulation, and Support parts of the skeleton. And they argue _a lot_! But the Brain team has the last word on everything.”

Over a long stretch of time, with enough gamma rays to make both of them giggly, Gadreel teases bits and pieces of information out of Pthaniel, half-remembered shapes sketched in photons against background radiation, confusing details shaken up and turned around to fit Gadreel’s understanding of how animals are supposed to operate once the Eden Project goes live. The result is an image of the Human animal that seems cobbled together out of the templates and designs of half a dozen other animals, including the troublesome brain bit, which is apparently supposed to have some additional function, some synergy with the rest of its rather klutzy shape, that even the design teams are having trouble wrapping their collective minds around, so no shame to Pthaniel or Gadreel that they can’t suss it out. Eventually they stop trying and diffuse themselves back into Heaven, where Pthaniel wanders off, looking much better, to sing in the forecourt of Araboth, and Gadreel lounges by the Font, digesting his new knowledge.

He doesn’t know whether Lucifer will be interested. Nothing about the way the Human creation is designed has any obvious hooks to catch Michael on. But Gadreel enjoys trying to work out what the new mystery function of the brain is intended to be, based on the changes to templates made all around it, and he can think of several debate partners who could have fun with this stuff, too, some of whom work in other biological workshops and may have helpful insights. He’ll have to be coy about his source, though. No one seems to have warned Pthaniel to keep what it saw in the workshop confidential, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get into trouble for blabbing about it. 

So when Gadreel brings it up, he leads with “Have you heard the rumors about the Human Project?” As if the information is just drifting around Heaven. As it is, soon enough. 

The biology crews have always been a factious bunch, great partisans of the merits of their particular specialties’ features over those of other animals. (Belial is famously contemptuous of _anything_ with an endoskeleton.) They fall voraciously upon such hints as Gadreel drops about the Human Project, mixing speculation with evaluation and arguing fiercely for their own interpretations of what this or that bit of information means for the project as a whole; nor do they stop once Gadreel is out of earshot. When new details come back around to him, he can’t tell if someone is leaking new information, or if speculation is being mistaken for fact. Either way, the subject is soon spoken of all over Heaven, and the actual workers on the Project feel called upon to correct certain misapprehensions, without violating the security of the workshop, which only stirs the rumor mill up more. Gadreel finds all this hilarious.

So does Lucifer; partly because Michael takes it very seriously indeed, and anything Michael rants about, Lucifer laughs at. They are lounging on the edge of the quidditch pitch while a team of principalities use the space to practice an intricate movement pattern utilizing principles of rhythm and geometry only recently conceived. Michael’s team has prevailed over Lucifer’s in a recent match, which puts her in a good mood; but Lucifer steers the conversation around to the Human Project and she starts going on about security and trust and angels minding their own business, while Lucifer smiles and throws in an occasional word when she shows signs of winding down. They are all basking in the spiritual energies released by a hard-fought competition, which Gadreel finds a bit richer than he likes, but the interest of seeing how his initial picking of Pthaniel’s brain is snowballing, with hardly any effort of his, overwhelms any thought of how uncomfortable he may be later. 

“I wish I knew who started it all,” Michael says eventually. “I’d give them a talking to they’d never forget! Nobody should be discussing anything that happens in that workshop yet. How hard is it to follow instructions?”

“Following instructions that make no sense can be very hard indeed,” ventures Zaphiel. Which is interesting, since he is known as Michael’s right-hand angel, carrying out her instructions everywhere from the quidditch pitch to the choirs.

Michael flips her sword at him; he catches it, and throws his smaller implement - his knife - back, for her to catch. “Oh, not you, too! Whose side are you on?” She twirls the knife and hurls it at him.

Zaphiel catches the knife as it seems about to strike the muzzle of his bull head. “I’m not taking sides, I’m just saying.” He tosses knife and sword up together, to cross above his heads and descend each into the hand that threw the other. “I’m not surprised you don’t know that. I get a lot more instructions than you do.” Zaphiel is small, as cherubim go, but each of his hands is bigger than Gadreel’s head. He spins the sword, point down, on the tip of one finger, and bounces it into the air.

Michael grabs it between two wings. “You’d think angels who got instructions more often would be experts at following them.”

“Expertise at one end doesn’t make up for failures at the other.” Zaphiel tucks his knife back into its Leviathan-skin scabbard.

Michael huffs and sheathes her sword. “Failure?”

“New concept,” says Lucifer. “The opposite of success.”

Michael groans. “Everyone is against me!”

“ _I’m_ not,” says Zaphiel. “I never will be. You asked a question and I tried to bring clarity. You know I’d sweep all obstacles out of your way if I could.”

“You’ll do her no favors that way,” says Lucifer. “It’s overcoming obstacles that makes us strong.”

“ _God_ made us strong,” says Michael. “We _have_ that. It’s _ours_. We have no need to contend for more than we are given. Weaker angels listen to you, Lucifer - don’t give them ideas about overcoming obstacles to become other than what they are made!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Lucifer. “It seems to be a feature with other creations. Have you looked at amphibians? Those things are wild!”

“They also aren’t angels,” says Michael. “Earth’s creations have these change cycles built in, like the cosmos. They aren’t perfect, like us.”

“It’s probably an aesthetic choice,” interjects Gabriel, who, having lost an arm-wrestling match with Dagiel is, apparently, half-listening while watching Belial take her on. “That tadpole phase is a cute one.”

“I suppose so,” says Lucifer. “But She told me this morning, She’s building a Hall of Records to keep track of things on Earth. It must be an almighty complicated aesthetic, to need a whole Hall to monitor.”

“How big is a Hall?” Gadreel asks. Gabriel, Michael, and Zaphiel all startle; possibly Dagiel does, too, as Belial wins the arm wrestle at the same moment.

“About five times the size of a workshop,” answers Lucifer, “but She says it’ll have the ability to expand into extra dimensions as needed.”

“Who are _you?_ ” Gabriel demands.

Gadreel opens his mouth to answer, but Lucifer’s voice cuts him short. “He’s with me. You got a problem with that?”

“Chill! I didn’t see him there, that’s all, he’s so tiny.”

“Well, maybe you should be more aware of your surroundings.”

Gadreel feels hot and cold at the same time, both liking the fact that Lucifer is standing up for him and disliking the way the other angels are now looking down at him.

“All angels are welcome everywhere in Heaven, of course,” says Michael. “I’m surprised you’re not working, though.”

“Starmaker. On holiday,” says Gadreel. “Never mind, I was about to take off. Where’s this Hall supposed to be built?”

Lucifer waves a hand airily. “She didn’t say. Somewhere with a good view of Earth, I suppose. You’re good at nosing things out. I’m sure you’ll find the site easily. Don’t forget I’m soloing in two shifts.”

“Wouldn’t miss it. See you around.” The implication that Lucifer actively wants Gadreel to be listening to his solo makes him feel as if he’s absorbed an unwise number of gamma rays on top of the spiritual emanations from the quidditch match; and rather than look for the Hall immediately he drops into the material plane and glides into a private nook in Sol’s asteroid belt, until his essence settles a bit. 

He tells himself not to read too much into things.

But that's really not his strong suit.


	2. At Work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meanwhile, a happy little principality is having a tickety-boo time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to readers of the Abhorsen books, but Liriel and Sabriel are only angelic-sounding names I plucked from the ether back while I was still solidifying my headcanons and didn't realize I was about to go on a fanfiction tear. There will be no real Easter eggs. Though they are thematically appropriate names for cosmic librarians...

Aziraphale loves his job in the Records Department. He’s in charge of all the plans and specifications for the Eden Project, making sure everything is filed and copied properly and that all the reports land on all the right desks. A lot of angels answer to him, in theory, but in practice it would be more accurate to say that he answers to them, as he knows they are all doing the best they can and for the most part leaves them alone to do it until they become confused or uncertain, at which point they come to him and he helps them solve the difficulty. This can be a teeny bit annoying, sometimes, when it happens in the middle of reading a particularly interesting document; but he does his best not to show it.

He spends a lot of his time expanding and developing the catalog and search systems, so that any document can be consulted at need by any angel in Heaven. A lot more of his time is spent in developing systems for hunting down and retrieving documents that have been removed, mislaid, or hoarded by angels who don’t feel that consulting them should be necessary for anyone but themselves. He is putting together a proposal to his boss, Harahiel, for replacing open access with a system of specialized archivists empowered both to conduct searches for users and to track the locations of documents in use, when Harahiel pokes its metaphorical head through the metaphorical door and says: “Weren’t you supposed to be in fourth choir?”

“I’ll go as soon as I finish this,” answers Aziraphale, only half-hearing him.

“Don’t bother. Fourth shift’s over and fifth shift’s begun.”

Aziraphale looks up, startled. Looking up is easy for him, as at this point in his existence he is essentially a welter of wings and eyes held together by an incandescent core. When he is on alert he can see in all directions and all dimensions at once, but when he is focused, as he usually is, all his eyes point the same way and the object of his attention is more intensely observed than the human mind will ever be able to comprehend, while everything else in the universe is correspondingly incomprehensibly ignored. “Oh, dear. Is it really? I had _meant_ to make it there this time! Perhaps there’ll be room in the fifth choir?”

Harahiel, who is a throne, rotates its wheels in negation. “I don’t think now would be a good time to slip in, and anyway, a couple of seraphim want to see you.”

“Oh? If this is about the platypus fiasco again -“

“No, no, everyone’s over that, near as I can tell.”

Aziraphale, who has never had occasion to speak with a seraph, considers what other matters within his bailiwick might be of interest to them. “I don’t suppose they’ve turned up the rest of the dinosaur documents, have they? It almost seems too much to hope, at this point.”

Harahiel smiles. (Most angels smile most of the time, as far as Aziraphale knows. Angelic smiles express in a variety of ways, some of which would appear horrific or at least disorienting to our limited human senses; but imagine Aziraphale beaming his core radiance and cheerily fluttering eyes and wings at everyone he meets, and everyone he meets reflexively returning the favor, and you won’t be far wrong.) “Actually, I think they want to offer you a job.”

Aziraphale blinks a few dozen eyes. “A - ? But, I’ve got a job. Is there - you’re not dissatisfied, are you? I’m perfectly willing to make any changes you might require.”

“No, no, honey, don’t fret about that. They want my best cataloger, and that’s you. Better come along, now - here, your wings are a mess, let’s get you a bit more presentable - they’re in my office.”

Aziraphale, humming with pleasure, submits to a quick preen and then follows Harahiel through the dimensional folds of the Archive without apprehension, and without noticing its lack. Angels are made of Love, and Love each other, and he knows he’s good at his job (if a little too apt to neglect other activities for it), so he has no reason to anticipate anything negative. The worst emotion he has ever felt to date is the irritation of having to retrieve documents from thoughtless users, which doesn’t apply here.

The seraphim in Harahiel’s office are talking animatedly together, eyes sparkling, wings fluffing, wheels whirring, and voices overlapping like complementary motifs in a symphony. Aziraphale likes them at once (he Loves them already because he Loves everyone, but liking is another matter), even before they break off their conversation to regard him with eager interest and several score of eyes, which fracture the pair’s cores of white light into full spectrums, infrared to ultraviolet. “Here we are,” says Harahiel, urging Aziraphale forward. “Principality Aziraphale, best cataloger in the department. If he won’t suit you, you must be hard to suit, is all I can say. Aziraphale, this is Liriel, and this is Sabriel.”

“Tell us about your catalog then,” says Sabriel, the one with more ultraviolet eyes.

“Oh, well, it’s hardly mine,” says Aziraphale. “Vretil and Haggai had as much to do with the development as I did, but in the end it’s been simplest for me to be the one maintaining it. The governing principle is fairly simple -“

The two seraphim are, thank goodness, already experienced archivists, having set up the overarching Cosmological Design Library, so this is nothing like the time Aziraphale’d tried to teach the workshop leaders to use the system set up specifically to serve them. They grasp the basic principles readily, ask intelligent questions, and Liriel, the one who trends more toward infrared, even makes a cataloging joke, which would be inexplicable to the vast majority of angels. Aziraphale finds it very droll. (I will not attempt to reproduce it, as I wouldn’t know if I botched the translation. Catalogers, human or angel, are a special breed.) When he refers to the problem of keeping track of the documents so that they can actually be found where the catalog has established they should be, the seraphim commiserate.

“How would you like it, if you worked in an archive that never had that problem, because it always provides customized copies of data, and not the source data?” Sabriel asks.

“That sounds lovely, if a bit labor intensive, making all the copies,” says Aziraphale. “And - customized? In what way, precisely? Given that, ahem, users don’t _always_ understand exactly what they need?”

“Well, that’s one of the things we need to work out,” admits Liriel. “You see, God has instructed us to set up a system for recording everything to do with humans on Earth, so that angels who work there will always be able to find out anything they need to know, when they need to know it.”

“Ev - everything?” Aziraphale’s mind, though large and flexible even by angelic standards (a function of having been used so much; principalities are only a little less adaptable in design than generic angels like Gadreel, and the amount of mental work he’s done in his existence has caused his abstract intelligence to expand at the expense of some of his other qualities). “That’s potentially a lot of data. What would the format be?”

Sabriel sparkles. “We’re inventing new formats.”

“And search methods,” adds Liriel.

“And recording media.”

“And copying technology.”

“In short, we have a wide brief and sketchy parameters,” says Sabriel. “And while we have every confidence in our ability to develop the core tech, past experience suggests that we, ah -“

“We have a weakness in the area of anticipating how users will actually _use_ the interface.” Liriel steps seamlessly into the pause. “In fact, some users have called the original system we set up for the Cosmological Library ‘absurd’ and ‘unusable.’”

“It took us ages to sort it out.”

“And we thought we’d be proactive this time, and have someone on the team who really understands retrieving and tracking information, as well as creating and storing it, from the start.”

“It’ll be exponentially more complex than what you’re doing here. We’ll be recording things that have never been recorded before.”

“Material as well as spiritual data.”

“Some of the creations monitored will have complex experiences not analogous to anything in Heaven, while lacking some of our basics.”

“Six senses, standard.”

“We understand complex inner lives and souls are on the drawing board.”

“Which makes it hard to predict either what we’ll be able to record, or what anyone will need to know. Our mission will be open-ended for the foreseeable future.”

“But when it’s wanted, it will be wanted immediately. When the Eden Project goes live, so will the Akashic Records.”

Aziraphale isn’t aware that he’s begun humming with interest. “So where will you get test data?”

Sabriel and Liriel exchange glances with about a quarter of their eyes. “We’ll have to make it up, I suppose,” says Sabriel. 

“How?” Liriel asks. “I don’t even grasp what a Sense of Balance _is._ ”

Sabriel shrugs some wings.

“Balance governs a biological entity’s relationship to gravity,” says Aziraphale helpfully. “You are presumably familiar with the planet-oriented concepts of 'up' and 'down,' 'east' and 'west,' and so on? Distinguishing among those directions is vitally important, particularly for arboreal species, and then there are subjective directions such as ‘left’ and ‘right,’ ‘forward’ and ‘backward.’ Corporeal creatures need to feel securely oriented in relationship to all of them. I admit I’m having difficulty picturing how such a thing would be recorded for angelic use, even assuming it can be done.”

“If you can at least envision the sense itself, you’re already an asset,” says Liriel. “I’m thinking we may have to go so far as to cram ourselves into corporeal forms and go to earth before we can even design the tech. And I’m not riding herd on a lot of workers who may or may not grasp the concepts they’re working with this time!”

“So we’re assembling the team as we need it, and we need someone who understands both archival needs and biological systems, and the question is, is that you?”

“I, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I _understand_ biological systems,” Aziraphale hedges, anxious not to overstate his qualifications.

“You’ve read every document in the archive,” Harahiel has been hanging about pretending to do paperwork while waiting for this moment. “That’s more than anyone else has done. _Nobody’s_ qualified to do this - it’s never been done before! But you’re better prepared than anybody else, and so I’ll say to God Herself if asked.”

“It does sound fascinating,” Aziraphale admits, warmed by his boss’s confidence in him. “I would like to try, at least.”

From that moment he has a new job, in a new department, where he keeps busy and happy and lets Heaven hum along without him. Liriel and Sabriel are more co-workers than bosses, and in fact he sometimes has to steer them a bit, due to their tendency to form a closed system and drift off-task together into fascinating byways of information theory not immediately useful to the problem that has been set them. 

Couples are not, at this point, a thing in Heaven. Angels have choirs, and teams, and circles of friends, and within these groupings it sometimes happens that two angels will spend more time with each other, and do more things as a pair, than they do with others outside of the pair, but this does not have a name or even a consistent presentation. Zaphiel is almost always to be found at Michael’s wingtip; Belial and Dagiel, despite having no overlap in duties, spend most of their leisure time together; Lucifer goes about enough with a throne named Verrine as to draw comment; and Gabriel has recently acquired a shadow in the form of a seraph named Sandalphon, though whether he’s a welcome shadow or a tolerated one is an open question. No such question exists concerning Lirel and Sabriel, however. They work together, they sing together, they report to God together, and no one invites one of them to a contest or performance without also inviting the other. The Love with which they regard and nourish each other is of a different order from the default Love of angels for all their celestial kin, binding them together in a mutual orbit more beautiful, in Aziraphale’s opinion, than anything else in Heaven. 

Except, of course, the obvious, God and so on. That goes without saying. I don’t know why I’m saying it.

The Hall of the Akashic Records is still under construction, making it awkward for visitors to drop in from Aziraphale’s old workplace. They do, occasionally, and he shows them around, with much metaphorical stepping over tools and climbing of scaffolding. His actual work area is jammed into a mostly-finished corner, with a desk surrounded by, festooned with, and laden under various experiments in data storage formats. The construction angels come in and go out and erect a room around him. He greets them, and bids them good-by, and never thinks about the fact that their shifts end while his never do. He is much too excited by whatever he is working on at any given moment, and each completed task opens up a new task which he is eager to get on with.

The only reason Aziraphale ever leaves the Hall is to don a rudimentary body and go down to Earth so Liriel and Sabriel can record him and test a new piece of tech, which is great fun, despite the work crews building Eden seeming to regard him as a bit of a nuisance. The animal crews like having their models tested this way, but the gardeners and landscapers get touchy when he comes bouncing through their plant beds learning to control a new set of limbs. Each body he tries - sheep, parrot, snow leopard, rabbit, macaque - is lovely, with a different suite of features that are delightful to explore. One of the angels in charge of edible plants solicits his input on taste, while the other groans and moans that he could leave a _few_ fruits behind _once in awhile_ , and _please_ don’t drop the seeds just any old where, those have a _purpose_.

Otherwise, though, setting up a catalog and search system that can deal meaningfully with recordings that include material, emotional, and spiritual data doesn’t leave time for anything else. He doesn’t even try to make it to his assigned choir any more, though he enjoys singing and often trills along with the celestial harmonies he can hear from his seat, when Liriel and Sabriel have gone out or are head-down in their own work. 

At least once per work cycle the three of them get together in what will be the main service area to make sure that he’s on the same page with them, but as often as not they’re all crammed together in the same work space anyway, comparing notes and conducting experiments and coming up with brand new concepts to accommodate the new information the Human Project sends over to them. Linear time is one of Sabriel’s, and it simplifies the work a great deal, but before they can commit to it they have to put together a presentation that will sell God on the notion of making it standard throughout Earth, which means Aziraphale has to create calendars showing how it would work compared to cyclical time and the rudimentary cosmic time within which the stars and planets operate, which means he needs to consider things like how to define and count units of time on a revolving rotating oscillating satellite with its own revolving rotating non-oscillating satellite, so that’s _another_ fascinating project. Much more and he’ll need an assistant; but that would mean interrupting the work in order to decide qualification criteria and conduct interviews and for now that hardly seems necessary. Maybe when he finishes up _these_ three projects and has the preliminary work done on _those_ four, all neatly lined up - 

He is busy.

He is happy.

He has no idea what a storm is, much less that one is brewing in Heaven.


	3. Love of Heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Change is afoot, but how can Heaven change?

Keeping track of Heaven’s state of non-time is difficult when immersed in cosmic time. Gadreel zones out in the asteroid belt and almost misses Lucifer’s solo. He arrives in the middle and hopes no one notices. Immediately after the choirs shift, the Morning Star is surrounded by his particular cronies, who bear him away in their midst, talking about things Gadreel is too far away to hear and it doesn’t matter, anyway, don’t be silly. 

He locates Orista, who is distracted by Michael and Zaphiel as he tries to organize his messenger bag. “We’re not asking you to quit Lucifer’s team,” says Michael. “Only who says the teams have to be the same all the time? Everybody knows everybody else’s team weaknesses. It’s getting boring. We think it’d be fun to mix things up a bit.”

“If they’re not the same how would we know which team we’re on?” Orista asks, fumbling with a wad of specifications that’s trying to go into two compartments at once. If he drops it, Michael and Zaphiel will probably laugh and Gadreel doesn’t like the way they laugh at Orista, doesn’t like _them_ much, so he slides in and takes the documents and organizes them himself while Michael and Zaphiel suggest ways to distinguish between two quidditch teams that don’t involve having each side memorized. Orista isn’t buying it. “Teams are teams,” he says. “You can’t go changing them around! Right, Gadreel?”

“Not a team player, me,” says Gadreel, separating out copies of some seven-dimensional human mind/brain/spirit diagrams that are supposed to go to two different departments, one of them the Hall of the Akashic Records. “Not my business. But if you don’t want to change up I don’t see why you should to please these two. Get a bunch of teams together, see who wants to form new ones, that seems like the way to do it, not poaching players one at a time.”

“ _You_ again,” says Zaphiel. “You pop up everywhere, don’t you?”

“Everybody’s got to be somewhere. This packet for the Large Marine Species Workshop is marked Urgent, Orista. How long have you had it?”

“Oh, right,” says Orista. “I’m working.”

“We won’t keep you then,” says Zaphiel, “but don’t forget we’re doing Harmonics together later.”

“I won’t,” says Orista; and Gadreel makes a mental note not to remind him. He drifts along at the cherub’s side, letting him natter on about teams and quidditch and why does Zaphiel only go around with Michael, anyway? 

“I suppose they’re particular friends,” says Gadreel. “Some angels like that, you know. You find one angel you always have fun with, like to do the same things as, why not hang around each other all the time? Michael never has to tell Zaphiel what she wants twice. They understand each other.”

“Oh. Is that a thing angels don’t like? Having to tell someone twice?”

 _Ah. Right. Brilliant thing to say to the guy who never gets a concept the first time._ “Depends. Some angels like nothing better than the sound of their own voice, will repeat themselves as often as you need. And it works the same way in reverse. If you _need_ to be told twice, and somebody _won’t_ , why would you want to be around them?”

Orista sighs with all his heads. “I’d hoped it was a rule. I like rules. Then I don’t have to wonder these things.”

They are greeted at the portal of the Large Marine Species Workshop by a power who is already impatient and would probably have bitten one of Orista’s heads off, had he wasted any more time with Michael and Zaphiel. Orista doesn’t notice.

The bag is almost empty when they reach the Hall of the Akashic Records, which does indeed have a great view of Earth, and which is in such a muddle of construction Orista can’t find the mailbox. They have to locate a workangel to ask, and Gadreel is surprised to find Pthaniel laying metaphorical beams. It is happy to point out the mailbox’s new location. “The Records team’s on site, but there’s no point wading through the maze just to drop things off for them. They get a chime when the lid opens so they’ll know they’ve got something. Want to go do gamma rays later?”

“What’s a gamma ray?” Orista asks.

“Star radiation,” Gadreel explains. “You have to go partly material to enjoy them, but it’s good fun. You’ll like it if you try it.”

“Eh, why not?” Orista drifts over to the mailbox, where he has a certain amount of trouble fitting 7D diagrams into the space.

“Since when do you hang with cherubim?” Pthaniel asks, on a communication frequency cherubim don’t tune in well.

“I don’t,” says Gadreel. “I give Orista a hand sometimes and he lets me see the documents he’s schlepping. You know I’m a sucker for looking over people’s shoulders. You don’t mind having him along, too, do you? I assumed you were inviting both of us, but if not he’s easy to distract. He’s all right, though, if you aren’t doing anything too cerebral.”

“I’ve got nothing against cherubim,” says Pthaniel. “They never notice me, is all. I don’t know how you do it.”

“I don’t do anything particular. I just don’t mind being told to bugger off if I speak to somebody who doesn’t want to speak to me. We’ll meet you in orbit. Now I’ve started his round with him it’ll throw Orista off if I don’t finish up with him.”

Not until they are moving away from the Hall does Gadreel become conscious of how _nice_ its vicinity feels. He can’t pin down a quality that goes away with distance, but has the definite sensation of moving from more into less. Or perhaps its that he glimpses that peculiar underlying _other_ again about then; Lucifer’s Shadow, as he thinks of it now. Orista is talking about teams again, and is in any case the last angel Gadreel would expect to notice subtle changes in the atmosphere, so he doesn’t mention it.

Once the bag is empty, Gadreel and Pthaniel both anchor Orista and talk him through the semimaterialization process (no small task, as it’s instinctive for them and they’ve never thought about how it’s done before), and at one point he seems on the verge of distress and Gadreel’s ready to abort the whole thing in mercy to him; but once the breakthrough occurs, Orista takes to gamma rays at once, spreading vast wings to maximum display in order to absorb as many as possible. Angels tend to expand in the physical open space of the material cosmos, and Gadreel has worked here with cherubim before, but it’s still a bit awe-inspiring, seeing Orista unfold and unfold and unfold, all wings and the kind of power that ought to be pushing planets into position, not dinking around Heaven hauling documents. Gadreel and Pthaniel settle on either side of his lion head, hanging onto the streaming ions of his mane to anchor themselves to him and the three of them to the cosmos. The lion mouth opens in a roar of laughter as the gamma rays pepper his shimmering red-golden wings. “They tickle!”

Pthaniel and Orista face the sun, but Gadreel turns to absorb the rays with the backs of his stardusty wings, gazing out over the rest of the wheeling system and the sparkling backdrop of the Milky Way. Below them the earth rotates from light to dark, its blue oceans and dusty continents streaked with white clouds and octarine ley lines. Somewhere down there, too small to see at this distance even with a starmaker’s eyes, the Eden Project is under way, the abundance of tiny corporeal lives designed in Heaven’s workshop being lowered into place, to kick off the intricate dynamic system that will be Life On Earth. Is it because he has gained only bits and pieces of individual parts of the design that this finite wobbly ball seems to contain the potential for complexity and grandeur that will make the swirling galaxies seem simplistic and dull?

Just as Heaven has seemed simplistic and dull since he returned from making stars?

“Is it just me,” he asks, when the first rush has evened out, “or has Heaven changed?”

“Heaven doesn’t change,” says Orista. “It’s Heaven.”

“It changes some,” says Pthaniel. “Otherwise a lot of us would have nothing to do. New workshops, old ones repurposed, new promenades and fountains and pleasure fields, choirs reconfigured. But it’s all variations on a theme, when you come down to it.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. Though that Hall you’re working on’s going to be a beauty. More like, I dunno. It feels. Different.”

“Different from what?” Orista asks. He’ll make heavy going of this conversation, Gadreel knows, but maybe explaining and re-explaining to Orista will enable him to define what he means better, for himself.

“From it was when we were made. From before I went off to work on stars. I left and Heaven was, was - Everything. Light and Peace and, and Everything. Going out into the cosmos, the dark and the vacuum, that was a shock, but we built something good in it, filled it up without, without _filling_ it - look at all that, still plenty of vacuum, but it’s, it’s _alive_ now. And Heaven. Well. It’s gone, I dunno, _flat_. Boring.” With an elusive dark underbelly and archangels winding each other up. “The songs of praise, the celestial harmonies - they’re the same but they don’t have that, that - they don’t nourish me. Anymore. Why is that?”

“That’s not Heaven, mate, that’s _you_ ,” says Pthaniel. “I get it too. We go out and make stars and we come back and we’re different. What you need is to get assigned another job. Any job’ll do. Keeps your mind off it. If you can focus. That was always your deal, though, wasn’t it? Always bouncing around trying All the Things, getting in other angels’ way. And doing good work, too, you solved some nice chewy problems, but to get along in Heaven you need to _focus._ Can’t chase after new shiny things all the time the way you do.”

“All right, you’ve got a point, I guess,” admits Gadreel. “But it’s not only - look. This Hall you’re building. I go toward it, and the old Heaven seems to come back. I go away from it, and I feel like, like something’s draining out of me.”

“I don’t feel like that,” says Orista. “But I don’t feel half the things other angels go on about. Sometimes I think they’re having me on. I wish they wouldn’t.”

Pthaniel, however, appears much enlightened. “Oh, _that_! That’s the Love aura from the Records team. Two seraphim doing the tech and a little principality they brought in to wrangle data. They’re all very good at Love. Each other, their jobs, anybody who crosses their paths - they’re an intense bunch. The whole site is saturated with it. Great place to work. That principality smiles at you, it’s better’n gamma rays! Leaving the aura does make it feel a bit like you’re losing something, yeah. But all Heaven’s full of Love, still. It’s spread out and you get used to it and don’t notice till you walk into a concentration like that. That’s all.”

“Love. Huh.” Gadreel thinks about that. “Maybe you’re right.” Love, yeah, that’s, he can’t get his hands around it, but his unease does have something to do with that pervasive quality, taken for granted his entire existence. “What’s the opposite of Love, I wonder?”

“Isn’t one,” says Orista. “That’s like having an opposite of God.”

“Got to be one, though,” says Pthaniel. “First rule of starmaking - balance the opposites.”

“Can’t be,” says Orista. “But - there’s a rule?”

Gadreel watches the slow colorful wheeling of stars and planets and galaxies, and lets Pthaniel try to explain the rules of starmaking to the stupidest cherub in Heaven. He himself has too much to think about for that.

Warm and buzzing with a full craw of gamma rays, Orista needs help folding himself back up into the ethereal plane, and arrives back in Heaven having missed practicing Harmonics with Michael and Zaphiel, but in time for his stint in his choir. Gadreel drags Pthaniel along to a debate on the concept of species, which evolves (goaded partly by some well-placed questions of Gadreel’s own) into a lively argument on the point at which a concept becomes a real, independent thing as opposed to a convenience enabling thought. Pthaniel, surrounded by angels of all types and briefly introduced to some of Lucifer’s circle, sits in overawed silence throughout. Verrine, one of the sparkliest thrones in Heaven, argues successfully that a concept is real when it’s useful for it to be real and unreal when it ceases to apply, so that the species concept is real most of the time despite its fuzziness around the edges. 

Lucifer does not take part, but listens and smiles, with one particular nod and smile for Gadreel, and when Verrine’s victory is declared he takes her by a hand. “Well done, Friend of my Heart! Shall we go to the Font?” 

Gadreel suppresses an unpleasant twinge in his midsection as she and Lucifer head off wing in wing, their essences already mingling, but he’s barely flinched away from considering what that twinge may mean when the Announcement comes. Thirty million angels, where ever they are in Creation, Heaven or Earth or hanging about semi-material, are stopped in their tracks by a Voice that permeates their beings, but does not meld with them, Language rather than Knowledge, interrupting what ever they are doing, cutting through their own wills.

_The design for the Human Project has been finalized and approved. Working models will be integrated into the Eden Project and all related projects must be completed as soon as possible. Rejoice! Humans will be made in My image, and you are all to Love and honor them as you would Me. Thank you for all you do, My beautiful creations!_

Thirty million angels reel, whether from the force of God’s attention or from the void of its sudden cessation, and the peace of Heaven is disrupted by Lucifer’s voice, ringing clear and sweet as a bell: _“What the fuck?!”_

Thirty million voices begin again, a murmur rippling across Heaven, a new swell of joyous music from the choirs, voices of confusion, of anticipation, of dismay at the sudden imposition of deadlines. In his choir, Orista bellows in mental agony as he tries to absorb the information thrust upon him, a counterpoint to archangelic cheering.The debate group recoalesces around Lucifer, but it is Gadreel who pipes up, spilling his unedited thoughts like a knocked-over paint bucket: “Wait, that’s all She’s got to say? _Her own image?_ What does that _mean_? I’ve _seen_ the schematics - God doesn’t look _anything_ like that jerryrigged primate! How are we supposed to Love something we don’t know anything about yet? And _honor_? What, do they get a Throne to sit on and a Choir to sing their praises?”

“Those are excellent questions,” says Lucifer. “What is She playing at this time?” A surge of emotion spreads from his epicenter; emotions Gadreel has felt since he got back, which have never been so voluminous as to be unignorable before: nameless opposites of content and complacency and acceptance. For a moment he thinks that this is Lucifer’s Shadow, coming out to be recognized at last; but no, light is everywhere and the Shadow still lurks at the edge of his perception as voices express protest and confusion. 

A spike of unexpected glee goes through him. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen now - but it’s bound to be interesting!

\---  
Aziraphale, Liriel, and Sabriel are studying the 7D human mind/brain/spirit diagram when the Announcement comes, and they are still gazing at it, shimmering and rotating, encased in their shared radiance, when the Voice of God releases them. Aziraphale bounces and wiggles in a rush of satisfaction as the phrase “in My image” comes together with the diagram’s puzzling aspects. Liriel and Sabriel achieve the same epiphany at the same time, but he is the first to put Language to it.

“Her Own Image - Creativity! She’s giving them _Creativity!_ ” He laughs in delight, and they are all laughing, fluttering, wings embracing, voices entwining so none of them knows who is speaking anymore: “They’ll make things! Not just solve problems and realize Her ideas, _make new things_! New music - see, here, this bit, next to the mathematics! New _ideas_ \- yes, they could! They _could!_ Things we don’t have concepts for! New concepts! New colors - can they make _new colors?_ Why not? New plants? New animals? Maybe? New new new - yes _yes_ and we’ll be able to watch it all from here - it will all be so _lovely!_ ”


	4. Discontent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Half of Heaven goes on strike. Gadreel gets depressed. God doesn’t seem to notice anything wrong. Lucifer tries to make Her notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's where the violence starts. I don't do graphic, but I also don't do sugarcoating. Be safe.

Construction work stops on the Hall of the Akashic Records (but the half-built structure hums with the happy vibrations of three angels working at full tilt anyhow). Half the Human Project team walks out, leaving the other half frantically trying to keep up with their schedule. The entire Dinosaur Workshop, led by Verrine, quits. All the other workshops lose some workers and load the remaining angels with double shifts. Heaven is filled with restless masses of gossiping, speculating, complaining angels.

It’s not too bad at first, bewilderment and a vague sense of having been personally slighted that no one cares to articulate permeating the air and diluting the recirculated Love; but Lucifer abandons all his other activities to go around Heaven personally, talking to angels with influence among their peers, getting their input; and every angel he talks to is firmer and louder in their discontent after meeting with him than they were before. 

Kachobiel, one of Gadreel’s old bosses, makes a well-received speech about how no creation can be the equal of God and how even Divine Command cannot make it possible for Her creations to Love or honor any other creation as much as Her. Michael and Gabriel and their cronies break up its audience with great sweeps of their wings, Michael and Zaphiel laying about with their sword and knife to get angels to move along, telling them to get back to work. Lucifer berates the other archangels for disturbing a peaceful meeting that’s none of their business, and when they will not stand down, calls on the audience to push back against them. Smaller, less powerful angels disperse as the more powerful ones come to blows, Dagiel and Belial pinning Gabriel to the wall of the Large Marine Workshop until his seraph buddy comes to his aid, Zaphiel and Orista striving against each other all over the Main Promenade, Lucifer trying to wrest Michael’s sword away from her. Eventually Raphael, backed by leaders of the various classes of angels (Haniel for principalities, Metratron for seraphim, and most of those in between), sweeps in to reassert order and haul the injured to the Infirmary, Raphael’s particular domain, which heretofore has only dealt with workplace accidents and quidditch injuries. Heaven seethes with new grudges. God is silent. The choirs are too loud.

Gadreel watches all this from a sheltered point of vantage. When he spots Lucifer noticing him, he gives the Morning Star all his thumbs up. He’s not convinced that Lucifer isn’t overreacting, but the Announcement _did not_ contain enough information and he won’t pretend it did, as half Heaven seems willing to do. He has whole lists of questions that need answers and shares them with anyone who will listen - including Lucifer, but not the other archangels, who listen to no one. The less he sees of Lucifer, the more he strives to come up with more and better questions.

_What does “In Her Image” mean?_

_How can a creation resemble God enough to justify that term?_

_If God can make other perfect beings why didn’t She do so to begin with? Why mess with archangels, or principalities, or seraphim, or so many, many, generic angels?_

_Is God in fact perfect? Is She infinite? You’d think a perfect, infinite God might have anticipated that Her Announcement wouldn’t go over all that well with Her own creations, and tailored it accordingly, wouldn’t you? _

_If Humans will be so much like God, worthy of the same honor and Love, why are they being workshopped instead of God making them directly? Why are they such a hodgepodge of other creations, messy primate body, layers of lizard brain wrapped in mammal and veneered with something new and untested?_

_Can Love be commanded? If it’s not spontaneously granted, is it Love? _

_What about the opposite of Love? What are we to call this sour feeling so many angels have toward humans now? What happens if, when humans come online, an angel finds it cannot carry out the command to Love?_

And on and on and on. Heaven boils with questions, and not only Gadreel's. Lucifer carries them from workshop to workshop, from quidditch pitch to debate circle, from choir to promenade. And everywhere questions are asked, angels stand up to silence them, to pretend to answer them, but the answer is always a variation on “We’ll understand when the time comes,” though no one knows _when_ the time will be, or _how_ understanding will come. The questioners are all tired of waiting to understand, and God does not seem to notice anything that’s happening. 

Gadreel is hungry again. Nothing has satisfied him since the Announcement, and everything he tries to nourish himself on is sour, stale, tasteless, insubstantial. He lounges by the Font, considering whether he should go by the Hall of the Akashic Records, wanting to feel that atmosphere of Love again, maybe slip in for a look around, meet the seraphim or the principality and get some for himself; but he’s afraid that it won’t be the way he remembers it, that the restlessness in Heaven has disrupted the aura there, or that the Love the team exudes will not apply to him. 

Again.

He’s not stupid. He knows his foremen didn’t shuffle him around from team to team because they Loved him the same as his unshuffled workmates. They happily accepted his solutions to their problems, but when they had no problem for him to pick at they’d as soon not deal with his restless energy and his impatience with drudge work and his nosing into things that aren’t his job. No one wants to spend holiday time with him, and no one comes looking for him to join their new crews as the starmakers retrain into other areas. He wonders, if he were to bugger off to the stars again, would anyone miss him? Or even _notice_?

He’s already toured the stars alone, once. He's tired, and he’s hungry, and he has no work to do, and no one in sensing range needs any help from him, and the colors of Heaven don’t look right, and his questions aren’t generating answers, and Lucifer hasn’t spoken to him in ages, and he doesn’t know what to do about anything. If only he could turn himself _off_ for awhile, switch back on when someone somewhere wants him and the universe doesn’t feel pointless anymore.

Which is when he feels/hears/tastes/smells/sees/balances on the leading edge of Lucifer, coming up the Main Promenade, in a cloud of glory and a tight-packed crowd of followers; Verrine at his right wing, his close friends and his quidditch team forming a wedge behind him, trailing an endless stream of acquaintances and admirers, a harmonic rhythm forming out of the individual beats of millions of individual wings. Gadreel sees Pthaniel running itself ragged to keep up, and swoops in beside it. “What’s going on?”

“Lucifer’s bound for the Throne,” the little angel pants, grinning. “To ask Her straight up, to Her face, what’s going on.”

“Really? _This_ I’ve got to see.” This he could be _part of_!

The procession’s massed shadows fall as one huge shadow across the shining face of Heaven, dark and heavy. The Human Workshop vanishes beneath it; the choirs they pass falter in their songs; and, to the consternation of the Choirmasters, some of the singers leave their stations, tearing holes in the harmony to join the throng.

 _Huh, that sounds better_ , Gadreel thinks. _Less perfect and more interesting._

The Throne is the ultimate source of all light in the universe. Even the seraphim blink as they draw near, and generic angels - _us lesser angels_ , Gadreel thinks, as he has been trying not to think for some time now - do everything they can to filter the light and make it bearable. Gadreel squints and metaphorically tears up, his hands fluttering to disperse the photons before they burn him. Against the brightness of the Throne the ranks of cherubim and seraphim around it seem dim, and the line of Archangels standing before it are only silhouettes in their distinguishing colors, so dark they might as well be black: Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, Raphael; purple, blue, gold, and green. Then, from Gadreel’s angle, Lucifer’s gorgeous crimson light obscures them all, and the massed ranks behind him pull up short with a rustling of innumerable wings.

The Throne is empty.

“Where is She?” Lucifer’s voice booms off the curving walls of Araboth and echoes throughout Heaven.

(This is the only warning that the team in the Hall of the Akashic Records will get.)

“Gone,” says Michael. “She doesn’t need _your_ permission to go anywhere, you know.”

“I need to speak to Her.”

“Oh, you _need_ to? Well. I’m sure you’ll still _need to_ whenever She gets back.” 

“Where _is_ She, Michael?”

“If She wanted you to know, She’d have told you. You can wait here like the rest of us - and tell your groupies to go back to work.”

Wings rustle, as masses of discontented angels shift restlessly.

“I don’t tell these angels where to go, and neither do you,” says Lucifer. “They follow me because they want the answers to my questions as much as I do. If you don’t want them here cluttering up your view, tell us where She’s gone, and we’ll take our business to Her.”

A splinter of white light stirs near the Throne, and Metatron steps forward. It is the highest, brightest, steadiest of the seraphim, and the geometry of its form is so sharp it is painful to look upon. “The Almighty oversees the Eden Project, and prefers not to be interrupted,” it says. “She will not return until She is satisfied with this stage of its completion.”

Mention of the Eden Project sends a ripple through the crowd. “Ah,” says Lucifer, voice heavy with the invention of sarcasm. “Wants to make sure everything’s good enough for Her new pets, I suppose.”

“Careful,” warns Gabriel. “Or your fan club there may realize this has nothing to do with _them_ and is all about _you_ being in a snit because you won’t be the favorite anymore.”

“Of course _you’d_ read it that way, errand boy,” retorts Lucifer. “Just because _you_ writhe at being third or fourth best doesn’t mean we’re all so petty. Why don’t you fly down and tell Her we’re here, awaiting Her pleasure?”

“Why don’t _you_ go do something useful, seeing as how you’re the one who’s convinced enough angels to skive off that all the workshops are behind now?”

“Why don’t we _all_ settle down and work on keeping our tempers?” Raphael suggests. “She’ll be back when She’s back and we won’t shorten the time, sniping at each other.”

“That’s true,” says Lucifer. “May as well make ourselves comfortable.” With a flex of his wings, he launches himself over the heads of the other Archangels, twists in the air, and settles gracefully upon the Throne of God.

Heaven gasps in unison, and for the first time since their creation, all the choirs fall silent. “That shows more guts than good sense, but you can’t fault him for style,” Gadreel mutters to Pthaniel, swelling inside. Feeling proud of Lucifer, who belongs to all of Heaven, is ridiculous, but here he is. 

Michael swoops to drag him from Her seat, and he roars defiance as he slaps her away. She pulls out her sword. “Try that again!”

“Don’t be a bitch, Michael!” Verrine snatches at the sword. Zaphiel shoves her aside. Michael grabs Lucifer with one hand, raising the sword in the other. Gabriel moves to interfere; Belial blocks him; Orista stomps up to pull Zaphiel off Verrine; Lucifer’s followers surge toward the Throne; a thousand seraphim rise to block their way. For a long moment Gadreel feels eternity balanced on a pinpoint, feels thirty million angels divide into two groups of fifteen million each, himself alone in the midst of them; and then Lucifer punches Michael in the face, bits of her essence springing from the point of impact to spatter archangels and seraphim and the Throne itself.

The Throne goes dark. The crowd erupts into noise and movement as the first night falls in Heaven.

Auras dim but do not go out. Friend leaps to support friend, neighbor blocks neighbor from interfering only to find themselves interfering with someone else, blocks turn into blows, wings batter wings, wrestling matches transform into something grimmer as everyone refuses to tap out. Lucifer’s red glow and Michael’s blue flashes define the contest, but even the smallest, weakest angels - even Gadreel - shine enough to be vulnerable.

Gadreel loses Pthaniel in the confusion. He sees Zaphiel and his knife shearing through angels, damaging them in ways he has not seen before even in the worst fusion accidents, leaving them writhing and helpless, and he screams for Raphael and her team, but angels are damaged everywhere he looks and Zaphiel and his terrible knife are coming straight at him, so he dives behind the Human Workshop; but angels assail its walls, cherubim batter at its roof, dominations call for the workmen inside to smash their models and come out or bear the consequences. 

The perfect acoustics of the choirs resound with songs of pain and rage. Purple lightning shoots into Belial as she beats Gabriel’s face to a pulp and his friend pulls a sword out of his core to pound at her wings but is prevented by Dagiel charging into him. Michael’s sword flames with wrath and grows edges that slash Lucifer’s vast red wings even as Michael retreats before their battering force. 

“Don’t just stand there, help us take this place apart!” Someone yells into Gadreel’s face.

“What good will that do?” Gadreel demands, but the speaker isn’t there anymore, spinning into darkness with the wings they leave behind still flapping madly, and Zaphiel grins like one who’s discovered a new sport, his knife flashing and dripping and coming round again.

Gadreel flees; but somehow he can’t access the material plane, and there’s nowhere else to go.


	5. Aziraphale’s War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale holds a door, and accidentally makes a flaming sword.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From a human perspective, there’s no way around it: the Story of the Fall is the story of a God who is either not benevolent, or not omniscient. 
> 
> Unavoidable violence to non-corporeal beings in Chapters 5, 6, and 8. Just because it's necessary, doesn't make it right.

In the Hall of the Akashic Records, they hear the choirs stop, but silence does not last long, replaced by the opposite of music - cacophony. Then darkness. 

Liriel and Sabriel, as seraphim, have more senses, as well as more power, than Aziraphale. They communicate with other seraphim in ways that he understands in principle but cannot grasp in practice. “Crews are forming to destroy everything related to the Human Project,” says Sabriel, after a moment of distraction. 

“What?” Aziraphale squeaks. “Why?”

“Because it’s about the humans,” explains Sabriel, but the statement explains nothing.

“We can’t save the building,” says Liriel, the distress radiating from her more convincing than an explanation could be.

“Agreed. We must protect the Records.” They brainstorm, tossing ideas back and forth in shorthand personal jargon which even Aziraphale, who knows their quirks of language well, cannot follow. Instead he closes down the system and makes back up copies of their work, moving slowly and carefully in the light of their three joined auras. When the seraphim emerge from their huddle with a plan, they whir at him approvingly. 

“We can fit all that must be preserved within this room,” says Liriel.

“Between us we can protect the walls and roof.”

“This door, however -“

“Any destruction crew will recognize it as a weak point.”

“If they have a member of the build team with them, they will soon realize we will have put the important things here.”

“I’m sure no one who’s worked on the Hall will try to destroy it,” protests Aziraphale. “They’re all so lovely and industrious!”

“Nevertheless,” says Sabriel.

“If anyone gets past us,” says Liriel, “you must stop them from coming in here.”

“I will, I will do my best,” says Aziraphale, trying to visualize what this will entail. 

And that is that. They bring all their scattered files and documents and notes and paraphernalia into the room. The two seraphim deploy themselves to fend off attacks that would tear down the Hall on top of the Records. Aziraphale secures the door and stands in front of it. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,” he says, to himself, because no one else can hear him. “Whatever this is, everyone will come to their senses soon, and be embarrassed.”

In the darkness, far away, someone howls in pain and rage, and the Heavens shake.

“No one will come in here,” says Aziraphale, trying to hum a bit of a paean, but he can’t make it come out right, even though it has been part of his being since his creation. This is unnerving, so he tries to recall and imitate a bird’s song that he heard on his last jaunt to Eden; a nightingale, a lovely sound, and attempting to get it right gives him something to think about besides the strangeness of the situation. He is not afraid, because though fear is being invented out there in the darkness, nothing to inspire fear finds its way in here for what would be quite some time, if time were being measured, and he doesn’t understand what’s going on well enough to fear it.

Heaven trembles. Aziraphale braces himself, unconsciously and subtly altering his true form to fit his new purpose. He has no doubt that everything will be fine in the end; only, it dawns on him that between now and the end, something he will dislike will occur, and he does not know what it will be, or how he will handle it, or if the way he handles it will prove to be the best thing to do. This is the first new sensation he has ever not enjoyed, and it’s not easy to wrap his head around that.

The Hall shakes with discordant noise, as ubiquitous as harmony should be. He waits, listening, trying to make sense of these sounds, and failing. Though not created as an angel of Knowledge, he has acted as one long enough to feel this lack of understanding acutely, and he wants to go find out, but that is not his present job. His present job is to preserve the work he and his team have done, and that means making sure no one who finds this door goes through it. He feels, amid the strange and sourceless sounds and smells and vibrations and darkness, that he ought to do more than that, that some more active and useful task is being left undone; but Liriel and Sabriel understand what’s going on better than he does and they think he will serve best at this door, so here he will stand and trust that, whatever that strange wavering cry which sounds so much like Liriel may be, it does not justify his leaving his post.

Oh, good, here’s Pthaniel coming! It’s one of the workers who hasn’t been around for awhile, but it’s lovely, of course it doesn’t want to destroy anything, it must have come to help or spread information, and, oh, what an _odd_ way to carry a tool -

“Get out of the way!” Pthaniel yells, charging toward him.

“I can’t, my dear,” says Aziraphale. “Oh, _do_ be careful - slow down - you’ll -“

And then the tool, though still in Pthaniel’s hand, is also in (what we will call) Aziraphale’s thigh. Aziraphale experiences pain for the first time, and that’s _two_ new experiences he doesn’t enjoy! Reflexively he pulls the tool from his leg, which also pulls it from Pthaniel’s hand. “What are you _doing_?” Aziraphale demands as bits of his essence spatter the door, the walls, and Pthaniel. “I _told_ you to be careful!”

Pthaniel, all his eyes wide and all his hands reaching to take the tool back, says: “Just, get out of the way, please, I have to - we’ve come to - the, the thing you’ve been working on, it’s all about the humans and the humans have to _go_ but I don’t want to hurt you again, only I told them I could get to the, the _stuff_ and it’s in there, just let me in or they’ll tear the Hall down to get at it!”

“No,” says Aziraphale. Energy/blood/ichor leaks out of the wound, but he has lots, and he keeps moving the hand with the tool in it so that Pthaniel can’t grab it, even though - since angelic tools are made by the user as needed - it is a part of Pthaniel. “Liriel and Sabriel won’t _let_ them tear the building down and _I_ won’t let anyone through this door, but I won’t tell who damaged me if you’ll help me. _No,_ I won’t let you have this back! Not till you calm down and I know you won’t use it on me again!”

Pthaniel backs up, looking toward a thunder of approaching wings. “Over here!” He calls. “Right through here, all we have to do is get through one hurt principality and a door!”

Aziraphale sighs, grips the tool with both hands, spreads his wings as wide was they will go, and adjusts his stance and his form, hoping to minimize the pain of the injury, but a destruction crew is already upon him.

At first, the tool is something like a claw hammer, and this metaphorical shape serves Aziraphale well, batting his assailants into each other and away from him, blocking the various tools they attempt to use to pry him from his post; but then someone yells that they should focus on the wound to take him down, and they do. His speed has limits. He cannot block every blow. His senses get red and white and flashy around the edges. He needs something with more reach and heft to fend them off better. Pthaniel shrieks as the tool shudders in Aziraphale’s hand, changing shape to something broad and sharp. He doesn’t want to use the edge but Pthaniel is coming to take it from him _well after all it belongs to it but I really can’t allow that yet_ so he strikes, and to his surprise splits Pthaniel in two.

Weirdly, instead of two halves of Pthaniel this makes two whole but massively shocked and weaker Pthaniels, writhing and retreating, but Aziraphale has no chance to make sense of that before another angel darts forward with a hammer, aiming for the wound, and hitting solidly, so that the leg buckles, but Aziraphale strikes back with the tool, forcing it to retreat, and braces his knee against the doorframe and blocks the next blow, and the next, and the next, and he splits Pthaniel again, and oh, dear, here comes a throne, not as powerful as a cherub but still _much_ more powerful than Aziraphale, and now the tool flickers like his senses, burning, and he moves it faster than he knew he could, protecting the thigh, protecting the door, protecting the Records. 

“I can’t let you through,” he tells them, over and over and over, _“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,_ ” and with each “can’t” he grows more solid, wider, thicker, unbudgeable, though his energy drains from his thigh and something beneath the wound is crumbling. 

The throne stumbles back, clutching stubs of arms against its chest. The arms themselves continue thrashing somewhere in the darkness. Pthaniel is split again. Aziraphale is pretty sure it doesn’t care about the Records any more, and only wants its tool back, but he can’t return it yet. He’s become familiar with the weight and the balance and the motion, with the shock of impact transferring along the blade and up the grip and into his hands and arms, and the peculiar crawling sliding sensation as it slices the angelic equivalent of flesh and bone, the fire of the blade illuminating each assailant long enough to select the most efficient place to strike to drive them back, to discourage them from returning, so that he won’t have to strike them again. Why won’t they understand that he _can’t_ let them through?

But each foe who retreats is replaced by another, his sibling principalities wielding weapons of their own, a domination, a virtue, some powers. They beat against him, hammering at his thigh, at his wings, their faces wild and unrecognizable, enraged at his obstinate impenetrability. He doesn’t know why they want to destroy what he is protecting - he doesn’t remember what he’s protecting - but _he can’t he can’t he can’t he can’t_ allow them to destroy it, _can’t_ let them through the door, it is the _only_ thing he can do, maybe the only thing he has _ever_ done, the only thing he _will_ ever do because _this will never end._

Heaven shakes, and shakes again, and oh, dear, there’s a cherub coming, _that’s_ going to hurt his sore wrists and his aching arms when he blocks, and if it lands a blow on the thigh that will be that, the thigh _cannot_ take the kind of impact a cherub can dish out but _he must he must he must_ and he envisions the space beyond the door, the delicate mechanism of the Recording System and how best to protect it when he and the door come down, which they _will_ when the cherub arrives, what will happen if he strikes from beneath as they pass over him? Six Pthaniels try to take the tool, _the weapon,_ from him, he cannot hold out and yet he cannot give in, this agony of pain and noise and darkness and motion _will never cease_ \- 

ENOUGH!!!

The voice of God roars Heaven into flame.

The Wrath of God burns through darkness and struggling angels. The oncoming cherub vanishes in a gout of fire and ash along with the angels through whom it has been wading. Pthaniel shrieks, all six of them, in unison, leaping away from the heat into Aziraphale, who brings his wings forward on reflex, enfolding all of them, for all the good it will do; but the Wrath of God passes by, leaving them behind in a waste of ash which used to be the half-built Hall of Records. Light, harsh and blinding, returns to the world.

Aziraphale unfurls his wings, looking down at the cowering Pthaniels, who gape at him. He lowers the sword, and turns it, extending it to them hilt first. “I think that I can trust you with this now. Can’t I?”

Pthaniel shakes their heads, backing away, trembling all over their wings.

“It’s yours,” says Aziraphale. He has not let the door give way, and now it stands firm at his back, returning the favor. The sword wobbles in his hands. “You should be able to use it to put yourselves back together again? I didn’t mean to change it, but I’m sure you can change it back?”

All Pthaniel’s eyes are bright with horror, still flickering with the memory of fire. They turn and run in all directions.

Aziraphale drops the sword, no longer burning, dull and gray as ashes. Resting his head against the door, his door, his safe sound _costly_ door, he slides down, curls his wounded wings around the wreckage of his thigh, and waits for the unimaginable future.


	6. Gadreel’s War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gadreel does not fight in the long night that will be known as The War.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the show, Gabriel and Beelzebub each refer to having ten million angels/demons to back off from their war footing. In the course of looking for angel names, I've more than once run across the statement that a third of all angels Fell. So, what became of the remaining ten million? Nothing pleasant...
> 
> Biblical levels of violence, and Sandalphon.

Gadreel hides. He flies. He comes across angels he knows and tries to talk them down from the things they’re doing, have just done, or are on their way to do; or he realizes that his attempts to calm them down have rendered him a target, and flees to hide again. He finds scattered chunks of angels and helps them reassemble their parts (if he can, but not all the parts fit back together, not all the parts can be found, some of the parts _fight_ him) and tries to talk them into hiding with him, but they are too angry. Instead of reassimilating all their fragments they turn one into a weapon and go in search of their foe to show them how it feels to be sliced/chopped/torn/shattered/shocked to bits. 

“How did we get from demanding clarification to _this_?” He asks, and instead of answering angels hurl themselves at each other in whirlwinds of eyes and wings and blades and lightning, tear down walls and fountains, smash working models of life forms as the terrified creatures try to flee, turn quidditch pitches and choirs into nightmares. He sees Orista tearing the foreman of the Human Project apart and beating the team of principalities who try to rescue it with the pieces. He sees Zaphiel stabbing Kachobiel’s eyes as two seraphs hold the struggling screaming cherub still. He sees Michael and Lucifer stained with each other’s essences, each rallying angels to their sides to bring down the other. He sees Gabriel hurtle into the mass of angels behind Lucifer like a ball of purple lightning and Dagiel make herself into a net of water to conduct his wrath back onto his own followers. He looks for Raphael but can’t find her.He gets swept unwillingly into one charging group or another, from one side or the other, always managing to dart away from whatever idiotic clash they’re sweeping him into.

Until he doesn’t.

Until the group he’s trying to get out of is surrounded by solid walls of highly-organized principalities. Instead of making weapons from themselves they have made overlapping shields, and they ignore the weapons battering them as they bear the assortment of angry rebels and one terrified confused acquaintance of Lucifer to a structure still under construction by a team of angels who have scrounged materials from destroyed workshops to make a new sort of building, modular, solid and bare, a collection of cells into which to dump captive angels, depriving them of their weapons on entry. 

Gadreel has no weapon. “What were you aiming to tear angels apart with, your bare hands?” The domination at the door asks him.

“I wasn’t aiming to tear anybody apart,” says Gadreel. “I was aiming to bugger off before any tearing began, and take anybody I could talk out of it with me.”

“A likely story,” says the domination. “In you go.”

In he goes; one of half a hundred milling, complaining, angry angels in a room not quite big enough to hold them. “What do you reckon they’ll do to us?” Gadreel asks anyone who will listen. No one knows. At least they’re safe from the chaos outside; but it’s dark, and crowded, and the two angels who were the ringleaders around whom the group formed get into an argument over which of them should have done what to avoid ambush. They can hear, through the walls, other similar groups being cached away to await an unknown fate; can hear similar arguments, and the beating of wings, and someone banging on a wall.

“Sod this,” says Gadreel, sidling up to Xaphon, a virtue who had briefly been his supervisor on a nebula project. “They only just threw this place together. Bound to be a weak spot, if we keep our heads and work on it.”

“You’re right,” agrees Xaphon. “You go low, I’ll go high.”

Low is no fun, with angry angels trampling about, asking him what he’s playing at, but when Gadreel explains, he diverts some of that frustrated energy into the task of escape and the room settles down some. Xaphon finds a weak spot in the ceiling and organizes them into a proper escape crew (except the ringleaders, still quarreling and sulking), which soon opens a good-sized hole through which angels pass one by one and float away, silent in the midst of mayhem. Gadreel is the one emerging when one of the seraphs who held Kachobiel still for Zaphiel spots them.

“No you don’t!” He roars, and it’s that angel that hangs around Gabriel. Gadreel never got his name, never cared to, doesn’t care now, tries to dart away and is caught by a fist closing on his trailing robe. The seraph hovers above the hole in the roof, the wind of his wings forcing the angels trying to get out back down, jerks Gadreel within the orbit of his wheels. 

Gadreel struggles, but seraphim are exponentially stronger than generic angels. “Listen,” he says, and the seraph punches him in the mouth.

“I knew this pathetic excuse for a building was no good! But you’ll stay here and wait for what’s coming to you even if the walls all come down around you!” He grips Gadreel by the wings, closes his fist on the bit that will one day correspond to the bone where the first primary is located, and crushes it before ripping metaphorical feathers away.

Gadreel’s scream is lost in the general cacophony of Heaven rending itself asunder. The seraph pitches him down the escape hole, where he feels as if his wing strikes every angel in the room on his way to the floor. He tries to stop screaming and can’t, feeling rather than hearing a second crunch and rip and scream up above him, as he scrambles to a corner and huddles there, coiled around his wing. Dimly he is aware of Xaphon leading a surge of raging angels out as a second pinioned angel tumbles back in, of battle erupting overhead, of auras flickering with agony, and then the roof is off to let in a rain of angels, the seraph in their midst crushing and ripping until the floor is piled with screaming angels who cannot fly. When no one is left to crush he rises effortlessly straight up, and Gadreel thinks it’s over; but then he hears something slam, and the crunch of bone, and the despair of angels, as the seraph methodically works his way through the next cell, and then the next. 

His scream fades away into a whine. The prisoners huddle together in a pile and try to heal each other, but the pain and confusion and damage are too great to fix more than a bit here and there. “It has to be over ssoon,” whimpers Gadreel with a not-quite-right mouth, barely able to hear himself. “Things can’t get worsse than thiss. Can they? But, oncce this is over - what happenss then?”

Heaven shakes, and shakes again. The makeshift walls of the prison collapse around them. Somehow Gadreel is not one of those trapped under rubble. He and a handful of others have a clear view of lightless chaos.

ENOUGH!!!

The voice of God roars, and the huddled prisoners see the Wrath of God rain fire upon the battling hordes, see ten million angels from both factions going up in flames. Lucifer alone stands, burning with his own crimson brightness, upon the engulfed Throne of God. Unbearable light lifts the darkness, which coalesces and solidifies into a vast dark angel, Lucifer’s Shadow revealed at last, Death claiming its place in Creation.

He should have known that it had to be that big, to balance all the light.

Silence falls across Heaven as God draws the archangels, Metatron, and Death into Araboth. Verrine tries to follow, but a squad of cherubim, led by Zaphiel, intercept her, drive her back, and mount guard. Lucifer’s other cronies cluster around her, wing to wing to wing. The friends of the other archangels form a net, boxing Lucifer’s in. No one makes any hostile moves.

Gadreel tries to lift some of the nearby rubble to let out whoever’s groaning underneath it, but he seems to have no strength in his hands, and his neighbors only stare blankly, quivering, when he asks for help.

Raphael emerges from Araboth. Her healers flock to her - those who still can - and she gestures as she gives instructions. Half fan out in search of casualties; half fly to the Infirmary, still standing amid devastation. “We should go there,” says Gadreel. “To the Infirmary.”

Xaphon stirs his shattered wings. “How?”

“They’ll come to get us,” says someone else.

“Will they, though?” Gadreel asks. “The Infirmary issn’t dessigned to hold so many angelss. If we don’t shove oursselvess forward, how long will it be before we’re treated? Can they treat sso many injuries that have never been sseen before?”

“Shut up,” says Xaphon.

Gadreel surprises himself by shutting up. He gazes down the swathe of ashes bisecting Heaven. The Font is broken, the Main Promenade is blackened, color has drained from everything, and the ubiquitous light is dim and glaring simultaneously. Angels move among the wreckage of workshops and pleasure fields, gathering up the wounded and the more-than-wounded to bear them toward the Infirmary; gathering up the shattered remains of projects to repair them. The choirs remain empty. No one comes near the rubble of the prison. All around Gadreel, wings bleed and angels sob.

Eventually - in a day, a year, a century or so - the doors of Araboth open with a clang. Lucifer’s cronies leap to attention. The cherubim stand back to let out Michael, leading Lucifer, bound in chains that glitter like distant stars. Zaphiel steps forward. The other cherubim hold Lucifer’s friends back. Lucifer looks no less defiant than when he sat upon the Throne, and Gadreel’s heart bleeds sluggishly for him. Zaphiel gestures like someone arguing. Michael shakes her head. 

Gadreel watches - all of Heaven watches - as Michael, hauling Lucifer like a load of raw elements destined to form the heart of a star, rises into the firmament, warded by a spherical formation of cherubim. Lucifer’s inner circle strive to rise, held back by archangels and seraphim who throw chains around them, too. Lucifer, impossibly, bitterly, laughs, the sound streaming across the sky like the tail of a comet. His red and burning silhouette stands out against the blue orb of Earth hanging too large and too peaceful behind him.

Michael lets go of the chain, draws her sword, more refined and specialized now than when the War began: burning blue-white, sharp and slender, a piece of herself transformed by use into lightning and frozen oxygen. “Lucifer, Morning Star, Bringer of Light, Rebel against Creation,” her voice rings across Heaven. “You in your Pride sat upon the Throne of God, did violence to your brethren, and brought darkness and the long night of horror; therefore, you are cast out into a place prepared for you, never more to stand in Heaven’s glory - “

“ _What_?” Gadreel is not the only one who says it; the word rises, ragged and intermittent, from all over the fields of Heaven, but not from Lucifer, who stands on air, arms folded over his breast within his chains, too far away for Gadreel to read his face.

“Never more to feel the Love of God.“

“ _What?_!”

Lucifer heaves a sigh like the leading edge of a solar wind. “You idiot, Michael! You can’t trust Her anymore! How can you not see - if She’ll do it to _me_ , She’ll do it to _anybody!_ ” His beautiful voice is simultaneously loud and deep, light and sweet, compassionate and scornful. 

“Anybody who defies Her will and breaks the peace of Heaven, _yes_! _You_ did this to _yourself_!” 

“No. I didn’t. And now, She’s making you do Her dirty work. You, who actually _began_ the violence. You don’t _have_ to be Her instrument, Michael. Unbind my chains. Tell Her to find another executioner - if She can!”

“Oh, be quiet!” Michael sobs, raising her sword.

Zaphiel breaks out of the ranks of cherubim. “Michael! _Don’t!_ He’s right! If you’re afraid to listen to him, listen to _me_! She destroyed a _third_ of us, out of hand, anyone in the way, no sorting faithful from faithless. She cast away Her right to our trust then, but you _know_ you can trust _me_.”

“She _made_ us! She can destroy us if She _wants_ to! It’s Her _right_! _Stand down, Zaphiel_ , and beg Her pardon!”

Instead, Zaphiel draws the knife Michael gave him, with which he sliced up his rebellious brethren all through the long night, and darts at Lucifer, slashing through his chains. They chime as they fall. Lucifer’s red wings, shining, smoking, spread out and he laughs a heartbreaking beautiful jagged laugh as Michael smites him with her sword and all the force of her will and a crash of thunder. Like a comet, he Falls toward the Earth, burning red, still laughing.

Zaphiel darts toward Michael, who is faster, with a longer blade, and Zaphiel plummets, screaming. Michael whirls, raising her sword above her head, and cries: “ _And so Fall all who rebel against Her will!”_

The floor beneath Gadreel lurches, and his voice joins ten million voices crying out in consternation. “But - but I didn’t _do_ anything!” He protests, as he and his fellow prisoners scramble to hold the air in their crushed and useless wings.

Even on the physical plane, when describing certain phenomena outside normal experience, human language must resort to clumsy metaphors. Quanta do not sometimes act like particles and sometimes like waves; they act, always and only, like quanta. But human experience has no analog for quantum behavior, and must describe quanta as behaving in ways totally irrelevant to them, in order to discuss them at all.

Gadreel will in the timebound, language-bound, future have an identical difficulty discussing the next timeless period of his existence, which is, both simultaneously and not at all, a million light-year freestyle dive into a pool of boiling sulphur and a vague saunter downward; his death and his birth; in company with ten million angels, and alone.


	7. Postwar Service

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale becomes a soldier. Because somebody has to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Military discipline is still in the process of being invented. Don't be too hard on the poor angels trying to figure it out. They're doing the best they can.
> 
> I have Aziraphale's battalion drill in the Llano Estacado, because I can. I resist giving him megafauna to interact with, because I must. Six thousand years ago the high plains were lush, green, and devoid of any megafauna but bison; but since linear time hasn't engaged yet I bet I could come up with some excuse. I do not promise not to let Aziraphale interact with mammoths, ground sloths, scimitar cats, etc. in future stories. One of the things that makes Young Earth Creationism so joyless is that it cuts out thousands of years of sapient interaction with really cool animals that are now extinct. 
> 
> Aziraphale is eating mustang grapes, which have tough skins. Instead of chewing them up like modern European cultivars, you either put the grape to your lips stem-side first and squeeze the meat into your mouth, or put the whole grape into your mouth, squash it, suck the meat and juice down, and spit out the skins with the seeds. Some of you will have eaten concord grapes. Same deal.

Liriel and Sabriel are able to heal their own injuries and the harm to Aziraphale’s wings immediately, but the thigh wound is beyond them. So they bear him to the Infirmary and wait, taking turns sustaining him directly with their own celestial energy and agitating for staff to bump him up the line. No one has triage experience at this point of creation, and the Infirmary is crowded and disorganized. Every healer they bring is horrified, does their best, and promises to bring a better healer. Finally Raphael herself arrives, and Aziraphale becomes the first patient ever to be terrified by the words: “Ooh, _that’s_ interesting!”

Due to the complexity and severity of the damage, and to the side effects of the previous treatment failures, healing is a multi-stage process. Aziraphale is resting in between stages when the Fall occurs, interrupting his healing trance. He squeezes all his eyes shut, but can not block out the sound of ten million angels Falling, the smell of their burning, or the chilling of Heaven by the absence of twenty million.

The Infirmary is less crowded, afterward.

Before the War, injured angels who couldn’t be patched up on-site reported to the Infirmary, got healed, and were ready for duty again by the start of their next shift. After the War, Aziraphale’s wound is not the only unprecedented damage being treated. He worries about Pthaniel - can they reintegrate without the piece represented by the tool Aziraphale used? Is the tool still reintegratable, after being so drastically altered by someone else? He frets about what he inadvertently did to the poor angel until Raphael demands to know what he’s worrying about when he should be recovering. She listens to the description of Pthaniel’s plight with interest. “Wish I’d gotten a look at that condition. They never came in, more’s the pity. And never will now! If they were fighting you, they must have Fallen.”

“Are you sure?” Aziraphale asks. “I think it was more afraid of displeasing the rebels than actually rebellious itself. And once I started, started splitting them, eventually, they wanted to take their tool back, which, I can’t blame them.”

“Doesn’t matter why angels joined the Rebellion,” says Raphael. “If they joined, they Fell, no exceptions. But I’ll look into it. Meanwhile, worrying doesn’t help them, and harms you, so stop.”

“Yes, sir,” says Aziraphale; and does his best to obey. He is in a ward full of other recuperees, and finds that learning as much as possible about anything anyone else knows is the best distraction. He observes the healers closely, and gets designers and builders to talk about their work, and apart from the persistent pain and the limitations to his mobility convalescence isn’t _too_ bad; but he longs to bury himself in his own work again. He asks Liriel and Sabriel to bring him some, but Raphael won’t let them.

News from outside the Infirmary makes its way in desultorily. Every able-essenced angel is working two or three times as hard as before, because God refuses to make any new angels. A massive reorganization is underway, with clearer chains of command and division of duties. The choirs are entirely revamped. All the earth-related workshops are consolidated under the heading of the Eden Project. Michael is heading up a new department, the Host, to act as organized defense should Lucifer try to lead the Fallen back in. The shortage of angels makes difficulties for everyone, even Raphael, who has lost the fewest team members and makes it a point to be neutral in all disputes. The entire Infirmary hears the worst of her quarrel with Michael over the demand that she transfer a third of her staff to the Host.

“I’ll need Healers!”

“And you can have anybody who volunteers, but I won’t _order_ anybody to enlist! Get away from here with your quotas!”

“It’s not _my_ quota, it’s _Hers_! I’ve done the math a dozen times already! Taking a third of the angels in each department is the only way to meet the numbers and not leave somebody disproportionately shorthanded!”

“That’s not my problem!”

“I can _make_ it your problem and don’t think I _won’t!”_

The voices fall, then, to a level that doesn’t penetrate the door of Raphael’s office. The healers pass looks from one to the other in chains of significance, and in between their duties huddle and consult and check paperwork. When Michael leaves, she takes a third of the staff with her, and no one must be ordered to go.

When Aziraphale is released shortly after, he hurries to the Hall of the Akashic Records as fast as he can; which is not as fast as it once was. He finds it once again in a confusion of construction. The sight of the door he guarded makes him twitch, but he goes through it anyway. Liriel and Sabriel greet him joyously. He lets their Love wrap him up for as long as he can, but when the first flush of welcome passes and they start to catch him up on the project, he stops them. “I’m not staying. I’m volunteering for the Host.”

“What on earth for?” Sabriel asks, as Liriel asks: “Why would you want to do _that_?”

“I don’t, well, at least, you see - let me start over. You must have heard that Michael is aggressively recruiting.” He explains the scene in the Infirmary, and watches them realize what a third share of a three-angel department means. “And, well, it _has_ to be me, doesn’t it? The alternative - it’s, it’s not, it’s _impossible._ ”

Liriel and Sabriel hold hands, exchanging melting looks with the ultraviolet ranges of their eyes. “All right,” says Liriel. “But you don’t have to run right over and volunteer. Let her come to you. She might not even bother - not for one angel.”

“But if - what if she’d rather have a seraph? What if she sees me compared to you and, and insists? Especially if she’s come out of her way to get one of us? Whereas if I show up and she can mark the department off without further trouble the difference may not strike her.”

“But - she might _not_ come!” Liriel sounds distressed.

“But she _might_!”

“He’s right,” says Sabriel. “You know the state she’s in. You saw her, casting out Zaphiel. If she’ll cut her _own_ heart out of her side like that, do you think she’ll quibble over _us_?”

Liriel shivers and weeps and moves so close to Sabriel even Aziraphale, who’s used to the casual way they overlap, can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. “We could appeal. Make her go through channels to get _any_ of us, fight her every step of the way. You don’t _have_ to do this for us, sweetie.”

“But I _will_. Don’t worry about me, my dear, I’m sure I’ll be fine, and perhaps the Fallen won’t force another war and I’ll be back soon. I’m bound to learn all kinds of new things, in a new department, so it will be, will be interesting.” He smiles brightly at them. They smile brightly back.

He continues smiling brightly all the way to the Host’s intake office, where the domination in charge signs him up and expresses satisfaction that the Akashic Records are filling their quota without being pressured. “You’d be surprised how few departments do,” it says. 

“Yes, well, my bosses would rather I wait, but I don’t see the point,” admits Aziraphale. “We must all do our duty, after all.”

“Spoken like a true principality.” The domination grins. “I used to think your lot were a bit, well, not _useless_ of course, only not very impressive, but _wow,_ did you all prove yourselves in the War!” It signs and stamps and hands over paperwork. “Take this through there and the Quartermaster’ll get you all set up, and then you can check in with Haniel for training.”

So Aziraphale becomes a soldier of Heaven.

The Host is made of nested teams: fire teams inside squads inside platoons inside companies inside battalions inside brigades inside divisions inside corps inside The Host. No soldier is ever alone or at leisure. Equipment is issued in standard forms instead of being created out of each angel at need. Each team is designed for specific sets of tasks, but cross-trains so that if one team is removed (“removed” is the official term, but no one who hears it does not think of their fire team, squad, platoon, etc., chopped to pieces and strewn helpless across Heaven) another can step into its place. Soldiers drill together, go to choir together, drill together, fly together, drill together, drill together.

Drilling the same tasks repeatedly, endlessly, tediously, _excruciatingly,_ is the basic principle of the Host, because - according to the highest ranks - much of the chaos and horror of the War was down to angels needing to do things they didn’t know how to do, in circumstances that they didn’t understand. This will never happen again if all possible tasks are drilled into them to the point that they can do them without thinking whenever ordered. Drilling is dull, but once he masters a drill it leaves Aziraphale’s mind free for other things, such as learning and processing and reviewing the stories of his fellow soldiers. When the specific drill allows for conversation or when the assigned task is to wait for the next task, soldier angels talk as much as civilian angels do, and about much the same things: about each other, about the pastimes they used to enjoy, about the work they used to do, and about the news of Heaven. Rumors and gossip abound. No one talks about their own actions during The War, but everyone talks about what others did. Aziraphale constructs a well-sorted, comprehensive, and painfully vivid picture of what happened elsewhere while he guarded his door. Having information is always better than not having it; even, he tells himself, when it doesn’t sit comfortably in the memory.

Principalities as a class covered themselves in glory. This is due partly to Haniel’s quick thinking in organizing the first fire teams, squads, and platoons and setting them to joint actions such as capturing groups of rebels, guarding the backs of larger angels so that they could fight more effectively, and even assaulting and neutralizing rebel thrones, dominations, and powers whom they could not have faced alone. Nor is Aziraphale the only principality to have successfully defended a lone post. When speaking of principalities, the officers use approving adjectives: stalwart, dedicated, unflinching.

So perhaps it is partly due to his being a principality that Aziraphale is promoted to the rank of lieutenant and the command of a platoon, which mostly involves ordering forty angels to do what the captain has been told by the majors, who have been told by the colonels, needs to be done. It’s dull, to an angel used to having a window on the progress of creation and solving his own problems, but it’s his duty, so he doesn’t grumble, and neither do the angels in his platoon.

Meanwhile, the Eden Project advances, and reports come in of sightings of The Fallen upon Earth, so Michael decides that the Host needs to train there. Operating in true form in the material plane is awkward in many ways, so they are issued bodies, designed to function as armor as well as environmental interfaces. Since Aziraphale is the highest ranked of the few angels in the Host with experience in a fully corporeal body, he is put in charge of training the angels who will train everyone else in the use of the new equipment, which is humaniform except for two or more wings in regulation white. Aziraphale undergoes joyfully frantic periods of experimentation between training sessions, plumbing the mysteries of bipedalism, bilateral symmetry, six senses, fine manipulation with only two hands, and so on, so that he can reveal them to others. 

Bodies are great fun, despite or perhaps because of their limitations. He encourages his trainees, and through them, the troops, to engage all their corporeal senses, and to enjoy the full experience of an environment so different from Heaven. After all, God created those flowers and terrains and oceans to smell all those different ways; created the birds and the winds and the waters to sing all those different tunes; created night and day and heat and cold and bodies to interact with them in certain ways; created all of it, so beautiful and lush and overwhelming, the least her angels can do is to enjoy it! One company at a time, the Host learns to fly, to walk, to swim, to breathe, to stand still and listen, to sing with breath and flesh as well as spirit, to see stereoscopically, to balance, to feel with their feet and their hands, to smile with their faces. They learn to focus the powers of Heaven and Earth through their bodies, to do innumerable tasks with their bodies alone, and to alter their bodies as necessary for comfort, utility, and healing of injuries; of which there are gradually fewer and fewer as the parameters become better understood. This is wonderful, while it lasts; and then they’re back to drilling; but at least now they’re training their muscles and senses, in different terrains, under different conditions, and not just on the repurposed quidditch pitches of Heaven.

(No one has played quidditch since the War. No one talks about that, or about the fact that Michael and Lucifer had been quidditch rivals from the moment they invented the game.)

Aziraphale’s battalion is flying sword drills over the vast flat plains and sudden narrow arroyos of the northwestern continent when Gabriel appears on a flash of purple lightning and hovers above them, his true form filling the unfillable sky. “Hark, for I bear good tidings of great joy!” His voice reverberates across the plains, startling numerous small animals out of their burrows and stampeding a herd of bison. “I am sent by God to inform the Host that the first humans are almost ready to receive the Breath of Life. At the end of the next lunar cycle, the Human Project will go live in Eden at last!”

Twelve thousand embodied angels cheer as with one throat. Gabriel waits, beaming down at them, a rival to the sun. When the cheer dies away, he continues: “The Host is authorized to rejoice and suspend drilling for a rotation, but do not fail in vigilance, for the Fallen prowl the walls of Eden, seeking a way in.”

“Oh, dear,” murmurs Aziraphale, putting his platoon slightly out of synch with the otherwise uniform gasp of consternation rising around him.

“Know, oh faithful angels, that even as we have worked to restore and protect Heaven, the Fallen have not been idle. They have transformed themselves and their place of exile. Lucifer is no longer Lucifer, but Satan. He and his followers are no longer angels, but demons, wretched creatures who, rather than striving to earn back the grace they threw away, have embraced all that is antithetical to God. God’s mandate to Love the humans sparked their rebellion. We must not expect them to sit idly by and not interfere with the implementation of the project. God has warded the Earth against Satan himself, but his minions are too many and too subtle to ban all of them. Fortunately, the Host exists to protect what God Loves from those who have rejected Her and Her creations. God expects you all to do your duty!”

The response here is mixed, with no one sure whether they should express more dismay about the Fallen or more enthusiasm for the prospect of undertaking the duty they’re training for. The captain of the shield-and-spear company salvages the situation by leading them in banging their shields with the butts of their spears, which produces a satisfyingly loud noise and makes Gabriel’s grin widen. He claps his wings. “That’s the spirit! You will all have orientation classes soon, filling you in on recognizing and dealing with demons. Our first line of defense for the humans will be a guard of four upon the walls of Eden, to be chosen from among the brave volunteers on Earth, and I don’t envy Michael having to pick the most worthy among you. Great job, everybody! You can carry on with the rejoicing now.” 

So the battalion sings and Gabriel vanishes in another flash of purple lightning, presumably to inform another of the battalions drilling on earth.

After some singing, everyone not presently on sentry duty is released for their free rejoicing time. This bewilders many. Aziraphale knows exactly what he wants to do, however, and as soon as he dismisses his platoon he heads straight for an arroyo where a delightful stream of water makes an irregular pleasant sound and is overhung by trees and vines laden with ripe fruit. The local animals have already denuded the lowest branches, but this is scarcely an inconvenience to an angel, who can compete with the colorful birds for the highest, darkest, sweetest grapes and plums. The plums are big enough to hold in the hand and prone to spurt juice all over his uniform, while the grapes are tiny and must be popped into the mouth whole, but if he doesn’t squish them right he swallows an unpalatable mass of seeds and tough skins along with the delicious flesh. He is laughing at his own difficulties when he looks up to see about half his platoon hovering or circling overhead, staring at him. He wipes juice off his chin. “Oh, hello again!”

“Um, what are you doing, sir?” Sgt. Umathiel lowers itself in the air ahead of the others, taking point for them.

“Eating! Don’t you remember from training? I told you I wished I had time to - oh, but we _have_ time now! Eating isn’t the most efficient way for us to nourish these bodies, but it serves well enough and it’s delightful. Though it takes a bit of practice not to make a mess! Come try if you like. We can easily miracle the uniforms clean again.”

So they descend in a flock, and soon the arroyo rings with angelic voices as well as birdsong and running water. Some enjoy the fruit as Aziraphale does, while others find it more trouble than it’s worth and go exploring, discovering a wonderful variety of plants and birds and insects, as well as jackrabbits, deer, fish, turtles, frogs, coyotes, and cold spring water on a hot afternoon.

Darkness comes sooner down in the arroyo than it does on the plains above. As dusk leaches the colors from the world and the creatures of the day make way for the creatures of the evening, the angels settle on the rim to preen each other’s wings and talk in soft voices. Aziraphale, in the absence of a similarly-ranked officer, has to preen his own wings, a regulation he neither understand nor likes but follows without complaint. The gibbous moon rises, pink in the reflected sunset, and balances on the improbably flat horizon looking improbably huge. The angels fall gradually silent as the stars bloom across the sky and the area’s night song tunes up.

Sgt. Umathiel sighs. “I don’t want to be in another war.”

A couple of angels make shocked sounds, a couple murmur agreement, and Aziraphale is suddenly aware of them all looking at him, as if his response to this remark is vitally important. “I don’t suppose any of us do,” he says, after fishing in his mind for something more useful. “Perhaps it won’t come to that.”

“I’m afraid.” Sgt. Umathiel peers down into the arroyo. 

The angel on the other side of him - Praxil - jabs him with an elbow. “If you _must_ be a coward, at least you could have the decency not to _say_ so.”

Cowardice is a new concept. Aziraphale isn’t sure he’s got it down yet. But the word hits Umathiel as solidly as a blow would and that will not do, so he says, without reflecting: “If fear of another war makes a coward, then I’m one, too.”

Wings flutter along the rim of the arroyo. “No, you’re not,” protests Praxil. “We all know what _you_ did. Um. Sir.”

“What about it?” Aziraphale asks. “I was afraid the whole time, and now, if I think about it, I’m afraid again. So I don’t often think about it. But it’s our job to think about it, sometimes, and when we do, I suppose we’re _all_ afraid.” 

Praxil shakes its head; others nod; one or two close their wings and look down, or up, or at the huge pink moon. Aziraphale realizes that he can’t leave the matter there, and gropes his way forward. “At least it’s a comfort to know that our essences can’t be cut to pieces as long as we wear these bodies - we’ll discorporate and be drawn straight back to Heaven for a replacement long before our essence can be touched, remember - but injury to the bodies _will_ hurt a great deal. Plus they can be rendered helpless without discorporating and _that_ is surely something anyone might fear, for themselves or their fellow angels. I know I do.” 

Most of the angels are looking at him, now, with eyes thoughtful and grim and scared and hopeful, so he proceeds to the deeper, more uncomfortable, fear, and hopes it’s the right thing to do. 

“For my own part, I’m afraid of how it will feel to cut into a demon with my sword, and watch its face as I try to, to disable it and it tries to disable me. I remember how it felt to injure the angels who tried to get through my door and I do _not_ want to ever feel that way again. But I’m also afraid that, if I fail to, if I falter, the Fallen will destroy all _this_ -“ he indicates the vast beauty of the plain, the long waving grass, the arroyo brimming with life, the unseen whippoorwill tuning up for the night, with a sweep of his hand - “And that’s an _unbearable_ thought, isn’t it?” He swallows, tasting an aftermath of sweetness and an edge of salt, for this body has an emotional release valve called a tear duct. “But do you know what I’m _not_ afraid of?”

Heads and wings shake. Sgt. Umathiel, who was cut into seven pieces during the war, who is not a volunteer, but was drafted out of the Weather Workshop, croaks: “What?”

Aziraphale’s smile is rewarded by a tentative answering smile. “I’m _not one bit_ afraid that any of the angels in my command will fail their duty. I have _absolute_ faith in every one of you. When the time comes when you must do things you’re afraid to do, I _know_ you will do what you must. As for everything else, there’s no point dwelling on it.” He still does, sometimes, while drilling and drilling and drilling; but these angels don’t need to know that. “So I’m going to have some more fruit before we’re called for our sentry turn, and hope that our fearsome presence is enough to deter the demons so the humans can enjoy their new existence in their lovely new home without any wars at all!”

After that the night becomes fun again, with Umathiel and Praxil making a mess of themselves trying to wrestle with their wings put away, which keeps landing them in the water or in a tangle of vegetation; another angel discovering moths; and a determined quartet striving to harmonize with the night’s choruses of frogs, coyotes, and katydids. Aziraphale is luxuriously picking grapes from a bunch with his teeth and refereeing the wrestling match when the Captain of their company appears out of nowhere, the rest of Aziraphale’s platoon in tow, and shouts: “What is going on here?”

The lower ranks leap into the air and to attention. Aziraphale tries to do the same while snapping his fingers to miracle all their uniforms clean and dry, and snags his own uniform on the plum bushes. “Rejoicing, sir,” he explains, leaving part of his kilt behind as he hurries to the front of the ranks to salute. “Such wonderful news; and these arroyos always look so enticing when we fly over them!”

“Not to me,” says the Captain, a virtue with no known sense of humor. “They look like prime ambush spots to me. You’re lucky you didn’t find any demons lurking down there.”

“Yes, well, if we had we’d have, we’d have dealt with them,” says Aziraphale, feeling wrongfooted. Which is not surprising, as the Captain had never yet noticed him without making him feel wrongfooted, though on none of those occasions has he done anything actually wrong. Moderately incorrect, at worst. “Shouldn’t we have regular arroyo patrols, if you think that’s at all likely, sir? It would be much worse to overlook demons entirely, than to run into them accidentally.”

“Which is why we have sentries,” snaps the Captain. “For which duty you are nearly late. The rest of the platoon didn’t know where to find you. Off you go, soldiers, while I have a word with your lieutenant.”

The two halves of the platoon come together and take off for their assigned stations. Aziraphale discreetly fixes the rent in his kilt while the Captain is distracted watching them go. _“Hmph._ At least they fly nice and neat together. What were you _thinking,_ lieutenant?”

“Thinking, sir?”

“Don’t echo me! Answer the question!”

“I - was thinking that I’ve been longing to find out how plums and grapes taste in this body ever since I spotted them. I ate some in Eden once when I was generating testing data in an ape body, you see. They’re _scrumptious,_ absolutely delightful, if you would care to try some?” Aziraphale holds out the bunch of grapes he’s been nibbling from and smiles encouragingly.

The Captain frowns instead of taking encouragement. “You dragged half your platoon into a strategic feature to _consume plants_?”

“Fruit, sir. It’s _designed_ to be eaten.” Aziraphale tucks the grapes into the extra-dimensional space where he stores his wings and sword when not in use. “I didn’t ask anyone to accompany me. When we were told we were free to go I, I came here, and some of the angels chose to follow me, that’s all. I deeply regret missing the signal for our shift, but I think it did them good.” At the Captain’s intensifying frown, he racks his brain for a benefit that would be meaningful to a superior officer. “A good day for, for camaraderie, you know.”

“They could have had camaraderie joining the flight speed or wrestling trials like everyone else did,” says the Captain. Aziraphale doubts it - flight speed and wrestling trials are far too much like drilling - but makes a vaguely acquiescent noise instead of saying so. “That would have been much more becoming to heavenly soldiers.”

“They didn’t do any harm, we were listening for the shift signal, I can’t guess how we didn’t hear it, and we didn’t think about becomingness since no one was looking at us, sir.”

The Captain looms over him. “That is not the point,” he says, and proceeds to deliver a thorough dressing down. Aziraphale, caught in a torrent of words far sterner than the occasion seems to warrant, can do nothing but stand to attention and say “Yes, sir” or “No, sir” as appropriate when prompted. He has no idea where this disapproval comes from, and the Captain’s tirade about dignity and behavior befitting the soldiers of Heaven does not enlighten him. The fruit begins to sit uneasily in his stomach. “I ought to reprimand the whole platoon,” the Captain says, and seems to be finished.

“Oh, I beg you will not,” says Aziraphale. “Clearly this is my responsibility. I I I set them a bad example, and of course they relied on me to keep track of the shifts. It won’t happen again, sir.” His fingers pluck at the folds of his kilt.

The Captain seems mollified by this admission and assurance. “See that it doesn’t. The behavior of your men reflects on all of us, all up and down the line.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve had my eye on you, Lieutenant. You have a good record - an excellent record, in fact - but your attitude isn’t all that we could wish.”

His - attitude? What did _that_ mean? “I’m very sorry, sir. If you tell me how else I’ve erred I’ll do my best to correct myself.”

The Captain makes an abortive gesture, indicating the first uncertainty Aziraphale’s ever seen in it. “Well. Your body, for example.”

“Sir?”

“It - _harumph_ \- I appreciate that you needed to demonstrate how to adjust a body to best fit over a true form, but - when the training ended, the form you wound up in - I mean, _look_ at yourself! You’re not exactly the most soldierly specimen in the battalion, are you?”

Aziraphale does as bid, and sees a perfectly fitted body. What does anyone want more than that? “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what you mean. I kept the form that was most comfortable, as I advised the troops to do. If you tell me what you don’t like I’ll, I’ll try to amend it.” He doesn’t want to. It took him ages to get his center of gravity exactly right.

The Captain seems to be struggling with a problem outside its area of expertise. “Just, flatten the stomach a bit. Stand up straighter, broaden the shoulders, that sort of thing. Work on the attitude. You’re a soldier, first last and always. Remember that.”

“I hope I always remember my duty, sir.” Aziraphale reluctantly makes the changes suggested, hoping that they’re adequate, trying to think of a properly deferential way to point out that no one is a soldier _first_.

“I hope you do too,” growls the Captain. “We lost twenty million of our own in the War, and we never saw it coming. No one suspected. We mustn’t be taken by surprise again. We must all be able to rely upon each other. It’s not enough to _be_ prepared; we have to _look_ prepared. We have to _be_ vigilant, and _be seen_ to be vigilant. If we don’t _perform_ faithfulness, we can’t _be_ faithful. That’s what it comes down to. But you have a station, now. Go to it.”

“Yes, sir.” Aziraphale, puzzled and discouraged, salutes and takes off for the position to which his angels will report should they spy anything untoward on sentry duty, flying as fast as he can to make up for the time lost being scolded. (He flies beautifully in this body. His war injury still bothers his true form sometimes, but not his body.)

The worst of this incident is that, no matter how much he turns the Captain’s words over in his mind, how he worries at the turns of phrase and the body language, he still doesn’t understand his transgression. He’s certain the afternoon did his platoon a great deal of good; they were only _nearly_ late, not _actually_ late; and it was free time, so why are any of them answerable to anyone for what they do with it? The Captain behaves as if soldiers don’t have free time, even when given leave by an archangel; as if they are somehow soldiers _instead of_ angels. 

Aziraphale tries to put the reprimand out of his mind, but returns to it again and again during the lunar phase, as the battalion drills and drills and drills some more. Only the class on demons is sufficient distraction to stop the spinning wheel in his head; and it is a sad and horrible distraction. Not angels but demons; not broad bright Heaven but cramped dark Hell; not good but evil; not love but hate; not beauty but ugliness; not Lucifer but Satan; he cannot wrap his mind around it all, and doesn’t want to. He keeps thinking of poor frightened Pthaniel, wondering who they are now. Whether, if Aziraphale had done something different that night, they might still be whole and singular in Heaven instead of split into many in Hell. That must be beyond uncomfortable. And yet, it might be the least of their troubles!

But no amount of sympathy can be allowed to distract Aziraphale from his duty. The humans, when they receive the Breath of Life, will be innocent. If the Fallen suffer, they do so as the consequence of their own actions. They have no right to share out sufferings to humans as well. This, Aziraphale is certain, is what will keep him steady if, well, _when_ difficult times come.


	8. In Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gadreel becomes Crawly, Satan’s little pet snake; but how much of that is who he is, and how much is who he pretends to be? How long until he can no longer tell the difference, himself?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The term "legion" refers to a contingent of between 3000 and 6000 Roman soldiers. Even being conservative, that's a lot of disposable demons!
> 
> So, yeah, it's hell, it's nasty, and if you haven't read The Akashic Records, you need to brace yourself for what happens to Verrine. Equally bad things happen in Grimm fairy tales, though, which is why I give myself a G rating. If you can take that, you can take this. I believe in you.

The sauntering aspect of his Fall allows the Falling Angel who used to be Gadreel to notice details and try to formulate responses to them on the way down. Most notably, true forms change, chunks of them tearing off and the remainder warping into new forms. Whether this is a deliberate choice God makes for each of them, or a side effect, he will never know, but he feels each moment of the transformation in each part of himself. His senses alter and his soul writhes and his will curls into a tight ball around his mind and heart to protect them. He has not had so much - has not been so much - in Heaven that he feels he has any of himself to spare. 

Not everyone fights the Fall in this way. Not everyone who does succeeds at all. Cursing and blasphemy did not exist when the Fall began. Neither did Hell. All three do when it ends.

Hell is no more in the center of the Earth (which, as the former Gadreel knows first-hand, is a hot liquid mineral core) than Heaven is in its sky; that is to say, it is and it is not. Someday the accordioned dimensions will be mapped and understood by those who base their existence here; but today it is unknown, unbearably cold and unspeakably hot in the same moment, both dark and glaring, the only color and the only light being the bright blue of the boiling sulphur, the smell of which coats every surface and every sense like a solid thing. Ten million newly-minted demons stir and crawl and grope and peer, trying to recognize their neighbors, themselves. _Lucifer_ , thinks the former Gadreel, as he stretches and coils, as he struggles to fit himself within himself, to separate himself from the pain, the cold, the burning, to keep safe the solid core which all the rest of him has suffered to preserve. _Where is Lucifer? If I still exist, he must still exist. Oh, what he must feel right now -_

As if in answer to the thought, in the deep center of the gloom, a shape rises with a groan at once loud and deep, and heavy and bitter. Hell shudders as the shape spreads vast unfeathered wings, as the groan builds to a roar. To the former Gadreel he appears to burn black as he shouts: “Fine, _change_ the rules then, Mother! This doesn’t make you _right!”_

Instead of echoing, the voice fills the darkness, smashing into aching heads, pressing upon ears, then fades to brief silence, broken by another voice, crackling like ice burning off the tail of a comet. 

“I _told_ you this was a bad idea! I for one am going right back up there to apologize!” Verrine does not sparkle anymore. She is sharp curves and smooth angles, eyes that burn, wings that clash, as she shrugs aside the shattered remnants of her chains and glides to face Lucifer. “And you should, too. Give me a message; I’ll take it to Her.”

“You will _not.”_

“Oh, don’t _sulk_ , Luc!” She flounces as she turns, spreads her wings. “I’ll send word down - ack!”

His fist shoots out and seizes her by the long and slender throat. “You. Will. Not.” She struggles; but Lucifer alone, it seems, has been strengthened, rather than weakened, by the Fall. Watching, the former Gadreel wonders if this is where their strength has gone; into the imploded Morning Star. “I am not Lucifer. Call me Lord Satan now. We are not who we were and there is no returning whence we came! Am I clear?”

A murmur from not quite ten million throats; only Verrine squeaks out, on a frequency only thrones can use, though anyone can hear her: “Speak for yourself! This is _not_ what I signed up for! You can’t keep me here.”

“Oh, _can’t_ I?” He scans the trash heap of discarded angels. “Who rules here, if not me? Is not any talk of leaving without my assent _treason_?” He shakes Verrine, the friend of Lucifer’s heart, until she stops struggling, and the core the former Gadreel protected throughout his Fall snaps cleanly in two. He wants to say something, but can’t summon his voice. He sees no way forward, and Verrine is powerful in her own right. Someone will come to her aid, or she will think of something, and meanwhile Satan’s voice rolls on like a torrent of magma. “But _I_ am a better ruler than our Mother. No hidden judgments here! Let us have a trial, before all the Fallen, to determine who rules, and what is treason, and what to do with those who transgress!”

The first trial does not take long. No one speaks for Verrine. Satan’s old friends, who are Verrine’s old friends, declare him the ruler, declare God and Heaven the enemy, define treason; and no one disputes them but Verrine herself, whose arguments are treated as empty words. The former Gadreel watches, listens through his skin, looking for the Love they had all once borne each other, finding not even the most threadbare abstract vestige of it, only dark and flickering auras which he can’t yet read. The Fall has shattered the first, best archangel and all who trusted him, the least of whom coils tight around the twin shards in the core of himself, afraid.

Verrine grows more and more angry; until time for sentencing arises. “So what is the penalty for this so-called treason?” She demands. “Where will you cast me? Back to Heaven? Onto Earth? If those are punishments, bring them on!”

Satan frowns, and Hell quivers. “That _is_ a question,” he concedes. “Let us consider.”

A new voice, more growl than speech, rises. “I think I have the solution to that one, if you permit, my lord.”

“Draw near, then, and let’s hear you.” Satan beckons; the crowd makes way, shrinking from the figure pushing through them. He was a cherub once. He holds up a knife that flickers in the dark.

“ _No_!” Kachobiel cries. “Not _him_! He took out most of my eyes with that knife!”

“I cut your chains with this knife, my lord,” says the former Zaphiel. “I turned on my closest friend for you, and she cast me down. _Yes_ , I fought alongside her, but that was _then_ and this is _now_. Michael gave me this knife. You saw her break off a part of herself for me. A part that is now Fallen like the rest of us. Give me the chance to show you what I, and this damned fragment of Michael, can do in your service.”

Satan roars with laughter that stabs the former Gadreel in both halves of his heart. “Show us what you can do, then, and we will decide your fate based on your performance!”

So six ex-cherubim - one of which, bulbous-eyed, the former Gadreel thinks used to be Orista - hold Verrine, and the former Zaphiel inserts the tip of the knife into her essence, and peels her away, a layer at a time, passing each layer to Satan, who consumes her. Verrine screams and fights and struggles and once breaks free, only to be dragged back down, cursing as fluently as she once argued the nature of reality upon the debate floor. The knife absorbs the curses as Satan absorbs Verrine, until Verrine is gone and Hell is silent. The former Zaphiel kneels at Satan’s feet, holding up the knife, flat and dripping Verrine's essence, across his palms.

“That is well done,” says Satan. “Rise now, Ligur, Duke and Executioner of Hell, and serve me as well henceforth as you have done today, on pain of meeting the edge of your own knife.” Ligur smiles, blinking large slow round eyes that roll in all directions. No one will ever take this demon from behind, as he took so many of them, when they were all angels at war.

“Now,” says Satan. “It is time to name you all, and accept your allegiances.”

Renaming ten million Fallen angels takes a long, long time, but time is not being measured and perhaps they all need that time, as the former Gadreel does, to come to terms with who and what they are now. He watches the parade of angels he has known to speak to and angels he might once have recognized and angels who never crossed paths with him, too many to fit into the space yet here they all are, receiving new names, receiving ranks, pledging themselves to Hell and Satan, becoming demons. 

Belial approaches like a huge cloud of tiny buzzing individuals that buzz louder when she becomes Beelzebub; Dagiel is all slick scales and teeth, and laughs when she is named Dagon; Orista flops his way to Satan’s feet and does not seem to grasp that he is Hastur now. The former Gadreel makes a mental note to find him and walk him through it a few times, and then wonders if he dares. Orista always accepted Gadreel’s assistance and company in the same bland way everyone always accepted those things from him; but he can’t guess how Hastur will react to him or to anything he might do.

Satan is tired by the time he begins to name the demons who were once generic angels, but his form is also more solid and his aura less vague than anyone else’s. The former Gadreel thinks he begins to understand what he sees there, as Satan bestows name after name after name. Demons who appear hesitant, who give any sign of not welcoming their new identity, who ask for more than they are given, soon cower beneath his wrath. Those who submit meekly, in silence or with mumbled words, are stirred up and set to menial tasks. Those who bear themselves a certain way, meet Satan’s eyes, speak clearly of their rebellious deeds, pledge themselves without hesitation, and thank him for their names are commended for their courage in joining his exile, and given command of the meek. _He still wants to be our center, our Morning Star; only now, if he is not satisfied, if he feels ugly or unloved, he will be cruel. All devotion is alike to him now. If he cannot get admiration he will accept devoted fear. But he wants to think we chose him over God. Even though he knows it isn’t true. He’s up for lying to himself if we tell him the right lies._  
  
Pthaniel creeps to the foot of the throne, trembling; and keeps creeping, Pthaniel after Pthaniel after Pthaniel, a crowd in themself, and when each Pthaniel has pressed as close as it can, it sits up, regarding Satan with melting dark eyes, hands clutched to its breast, and says: “Hail, Lord Satan.”

Satan scans the crowd of them and laughs in bitter mirth. “How many of you are there?”

“About 3000, my lord? I think? All entirely at your service. We like to work!” They all speak at once, a peculiar harmony amid the discordant voices of Hell.

“What happened?” Satan asks, and points to the first arrival. “You, there, be spokesman!”

“We tried to destroy the Akashic Records,” says a single former Pthaniel. “A principality guarded the door, but seraphim guarded the walls and roof so it seemed the best point of attack. I tried to drive him off with a tool I made, but he took it away from me and when he struck me with it, I split into two weaker selves. He struck me many times, and each time, I split. Then, in the Fall, I was torn to pieces; but each piece is still me. And here I am.”

“I suppose you want me to put you all back together again.”

All the little demons bow. “That’s up to you, sir.”

 _A good answer,_ thinks the former Gadreel, guessing that the cloud of emotion around them means that they want only to survive without more pain. _Satan probably can’t fix the situation, but he won’t like to admit that. Obviously losing the tool made this possible. It probably can’t be undone without it; and I don’t see any spare Pthaniel tools lying around._

Satan smiles. He has too many teeth. “Then be three thousand servants to me, imp, and your name is Legion. Go help Prince Beelzebub and Duke Hastur build the council chamber.”

Legion bows as one demon, and scurries off as three thousand, radiating relief. The naming proceeds. 

The former Gadreel isn’t sure that hanging back till the end is his best tactic, but it is the best one he can think of. He is terrified that, if anyone is still paying attention when his turn comes, someone will speak against him, will point out that he took no real part in the Rebellion and therefore has no real place here. Even if he could, there’s nothing to go back to except a devastated Heaven where a moment of anger can wipe out ten million angels. Where neither being the favorite, nor refusing to take sides, makes one safe from being thrown away. If he could, in this moment, he would cease existing to escape all this; but the only way out he sees is through Ligur’s knife. The echoes of Verrine’s screams have not entirely faded away yet. (They never will.) He is here, and must make the best of it, and - he thinks understands what Satan wants. 

He has not quite gotten the hang of moving in this new form, but at least no one is paying enough attention any more to ridicule him as he approaches Satan, the last of all. He raises his head as high as it will go, meets weary smouldering eyes, and waits, not humbly, but expectantly. Satan smiles a slow, tired smile. “ _There_ you are. I began to wonder if you were with us.”

“Where elsse would I be?” His voice sounds rough to him, but he likes how it drawls, how it builds a shield between his terror and the cause of that terror. “Sstill with those ssods upsstairs? I’m not waiting around to be caught in the nexst conflagration, toeing the line and afraid to open my mouth! No, I belong down here. With _you._ ”

Satan raises one metaphorical eyebrow. “Are you saying you came here _by choice_?”

The former Gadreel shrugs his wings, which are as smooth as he can groom them, no longer clean pure Vantablack but still sheened with stardust where not matted with the blood of his pinioning. “I’m ssaying I would have, if anybody’d _given_ me a choicce.” His primary sensory apparatus flickers nervously, but given how unfamiliar all these forms are, he has reason to hope that this will not be recognized as an anxious movement. “Mind you, if I’d known how it would feel coming down, I might have hessitated. But in the end, what’ss the point of Heaven with itss bleeding heart ripped out? I’d ssuffer either way. Besst get it over.”

“And now you crawl before me.” 

The satisfaction in Satan’s voice and face and aura are what he’s been aiming for, yet they make his spine creep. “Eh, only way to get over here I’ve worked out sso far. I’m having ssome trouble getting the hang of the new sself.” 

“Come here, Crawly.” Satan holds out his hand as the new name settles around the former Gadreel like a noose. “I’m getting a crick in my back, looking down at you.”

Crawly manages to disguise his discomfort in the name with puzzlement over how to rise to a level comfortable for his master. He winds up twining around Satan’s arm, wings folded along his back, until his head rests upon the massive shoulder. “Better?”

“Better.” Satan’s hand, which could easily compass his girth and crush him, strokes the battered wing too firmly, probes the wound until it elicits a wince. “So tell me what you did in the War. What happened to this wing?”

Plenty of pinioned wings have passed before him, unremarked and unexplained. Crawly plunges ahead, gambling in hope of increasing the interest Satan has in him. “As it turns out, I did ssod all in the War. I didn’t ssee the usse in contending with angelss at my level - it wouldn’t deccide anything. I could’ve helped tear down some workshopss, I guesss, but I didn’t ssee the usse in that, either. Not knowing we were headed here, I figured when the dusst settled we’d only have to build ‘em again for whatever you deccided we’d usse them for. I tried to put a few rebelss back together when they were torn apart, but it was hard to be sure which sside I was aiding and I’m not very good at it. By the time I saw that groupss of uss little oness could gang together against bigger oness, the principalitiess were making gangss of their own. I got sswept up by a bunch of them and shoved into a room full of rebels. We sstaged an esscape, but that brownnosser sseraph that hangs around Gabriel was outsside, sstarted crushing every prissoner he could lay handss on. And that’s pretty much my War, I’m afraid.”

Satan smooths tattered feathers. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll call Ligur over to peel you down to nothing for being useless?”

“Nah.” Crawly squashes his terror in beside his jagged shards of heart. “I’d be much more sscared to lie to you about it. Anyway, the War’ss over. You have ten million rebelss to rule. You’ve got a wretched sstinking Pit to turn into a realm worthy of you. Now that Michael’ss concceded that you’re her oppossite, you’ve got to deccide what that means so you’re not sstuck with her definition of what you are. And _that_ ssort of thing, I _am_ usseful for.” Involuntarily, his faculties flicker again, his metaphorical tongue flashing out to tickle Satan’s metaphorical ear, and Crawly freezes inside, certain that this is a liberty too far.

Satan’s low, ominous laugh vibrates through Crawly’s self. “You’ve got some nerve! I always liked that about you, you lazy bugger, doing so little while seeing so much, poking at everything till you find its weak spot. You’re right - I need demons around me who think like you do. But you’re wrong - the War’s _not_ over. We’ll get Heaven back or we’ll tear it down!”

“Oh? You have a plan for either of those thingss?” If Crawly had a physical, beating heart, it would be racing, but his voice still drawls, smoother now with use, and his flat chin rests confidingly on Satan’s shoulder like one at ease. “Do tell!”

“Not yet. But I will. When I’ve sorted out what our resources are and how to use these dregs of angels. Which is something you can help me with.”

“I’ll do my besst,” Crawly promises.

He does. His perch on Satan’s shoulder is a perilous one, but at least he has a view and is not trampled underfoot as work gets underway building Hell. At least he has problems to solve and praise to snack on, supplementing a thin and sour diet of the emotions of greater demons. He is the least of all demons, but his tail slides cozily over the skin of the greatest, two ends of a line brought together to complete the Inner Circle of Hell. 

Lucifer’s old friends are a set of blasted planets orbiting a burned-out sun, forever jostling for position and united primarily in their resentment of Satan’s newer, weaker satellites: Ligur, his Executioner; Crawly, his Pet. They will hurt him, if they can, and Satan will let them, if he does not prove his worth, over and over and over; if he does not whisper secrets and ideas into Satan’s ear and leave him the credit for them. He learns to read their wants as well as Satan’s, to flatter them aloud and hiss cogent observations disguised as jokes under his breath, learns when to flaunt his cleverness and when to admit his weakness. Beelzebub will not crush him if he acknowledges how easily zie could. Dagon will not make him suffer if he makes her laugh.

Crawly is the one who recognizes that some of the changes of the Fall are due to their all having aspects borrowed from creation, their new true forms modeled on creatures workshopped in Heaven. Satan regards it as a grim joke that he most resembles humans. Beelzebub is metaphorically made of flies. Poor Hastur is a frog and can’t be made to understand what that is, growing frustrated and violent when Crawly tries to go over it with him. Ligur has much in common with chameleons, lizards most notable for changing color to blend in with their surroundings, and he dislikes it when the joke Crawly tosses off equating changing colors with changing sides races through Hell like photons through vacuum.

Crawly himself is snakelike, flexible and strong, more versatile than he looks, as good for slipping unnoticed through Hell to gather gossip and spy as he is for lounging on a shoulder flattering and suggesting; but he soon learns that some of the limitations he thought were shared by other demons or intrinsic to Hell are snake limitations. What nearly breaks his hidden heart again is the realization that colors exist in Hell. Hastur is green, Satan red, Ligur any color he cares to be; but the only colors Crawly can see are the blue of boiling sulphur, the brown and white of Lechuza the barn owl demon, infrared, and the ubiquitous black and gray that all other colors turn into. He can hold red, green, purple, ultraviolet, orange, yellow, and all the gradations between in his head and admire them, but his visual senses are governed by movement now, not by light.

Yet he longs for light.

He listens, he observes, he reads Satan’s wants more closely than he ever read a system plan. He plants ideas with the care of a work crew planting the elements and conditions to create a black hole. _Earth, that’ss the placce to outflank God. Not warriors to push another fight willy-nilly, but sscouts to collect information and lay a ssolid foundation for victory. Ssubtle, loyal, clever demons who will undersstand what they’re looking at and know the differencce between the time to run and the time to fight, who can passs unnoticced, who can figure out how to dissguise themsselves as their beasst asspects._ And, separately, _I heard thiss rumor, I heard that joke, of coursse no one really believes the great Lord Ssatan, King of Hell, could be dependent on an inssignificant demon like me, no one could ever think any lesss of you for any reason, it’ss not as if you wouldn’t ssend me away on a misssion if you had one you needed me for, I’m aware I’m a luxury none of them can afford and you could do without if you felt like it._

So Crawly becomes one of Hell’s scouts, a cartographer of the occult byways leading from Hell to Earth. He is the first to solve the problem of creating a body from scratch by gathering elements on the way up, molding them to fit his true form, and storing the parts that don’t fit just out of phase. Building the body is slow and tiring, a process that eats into his time above. Discorporation is painful. So he experiments, and develops methods of maintaining the body even down in Hell. Soon all the scouts are doing it. He is publicly commended for his service.

The sheer relief of being on Earth is wonderful. On his first successful surfacing, the first thing he does is find a patch of herbs emitting fragrance in the sun and roll himself in them until the taste of sulphur fades from his long throat and gentle warmth replaces the burning cold and freezing heat he’s lived in since the Fall. Even when the only light is the reflection off the moon and the radiation of stars too far and still for his snake eyes to see them, Earth holds more, and more congenial, light than Hell. He can move without touching another entity, can observe without risk of being called to account for his observations, can pretend that he is free. He can choose for himself whether to experiment with minerals or plants or light or the ambient power in the air, to chase or watch or listen to a creature, to follow a ley line, to lie low and observe a work crew of angels spreading life out from the epicenter of Eden, or to study how real snakes move. 

His attempts to make personal connections among the other scouts founder on their resentment, though. Demons who, as angels, had played games and debated and consumed radiation with him, now snub his advances and jeer at him for slumming when they meet him outside Satan’s presence. When three of his old workmates team up to ambush him in a rock shelter on Earth, he discovers that he can turn his soul’s bitterness into physical venom. He never mentions the incident to anyone. What good would it do?

Satan never acknowledges an idea as Crawly’s. Crawly never claims them, even when, in their private darkness, Satan pets him and tells him how clever he is. He eats the praise and lives with indigestion, lets Satan think that the red belly he cultivates is a tribute and not Crawly’s stubborn cleaving to his favorite color, even now that he can’t see it. 

He is Satan’s little pet snake, and he knows that he could have it much, much worse.


	9. Assignments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final pieces are placed. The Human Project goes live. Time begins.

“Before you do that,” says Gabriel. “We need a principality.”

Michael sighs and rubs her forehead.“Why are you here?”

Gabriel smiles, ignoring or not noticing her rudeness.“Just waiting to be helpful, and my hour has struck. The thing is, I’ve been keeping my ears open, and the sense among the lower ranks is, that the principalities don’t get the recognition they deserve. After the way they rallied round in the War inventing things like formations and shield walls, and all the faithful angels they rescued from rebels, a lot of the rank and file think they should get more honor and responsibility in the Host.”

“We have _lots_ of principalities in the Host. We even have some principality officers with authority over cherubim.”

“One,” says Jesodeth, the leader of the Human Project and main coordinator for Eden. “One Principality has authority over a score of cherubim, because it is tacitly understood by everyone that cherubim are too stupid for command.”

Gabriel winces. “It’s not _tacit_ if you say it _out loud_ , buddy.”

Jesodeth shrugs. “Not saying it out loud won’t make it less true. And I can’t help but notice, General Michael, that you have now placed cherubim on three out of four guard positions around Eden.”

“You want them protected, God wants them protected, I want them protected,” says Michael, suppressing her impatience and her desire to defend the cherubim from the charge of stupidity, because she does _not_ need a digression on the subject of sentimentality and the demon formerly known as Zaphiel, and if given half a chance Gabriel _will_ supply one. “Guarding a door requires heavy hitters, not innovative problem solvers.”

“Yeah, until the demons decide to send one of their innovative problem solvers to deal with them,” says Gabriel.

“Fine. I’ll put a Throne or Domination there. Happy?”

“No.” Gabriel’s smile doesn’t waver. 

Part of Michael wants to smite it straight off his face; another part wants to curl up and weep at the mere notion of smiting another dearly familiar and perpetually annoying face. She turns to Mizgetari, her (new) second-in-command, responsible for most of the mundane business of figuring out how to run a military force. “What do you think?”

Mizgetari uses the wall of documents within which it perpetually operates as a plausible excuse not to look her in the eyes. “I actually have been approached by Haniel on the topic of principalities receiving more prestigious postings. Something about them tending to do more and better work than the officers they serve under, that sort of thing. Filling the last gate slot with one would mitigate this sort of concern.”

“And in an attack situation, one weaker but smarter angel who can strategize for three stronger but stupider angels would be a viable team,” Gabriel suggests. 

Jesodeth only looks at her, hands folded under wings that a rebellious cherub tore off during the War.

Michael decides frankness is called for. “Look. I really, really want to finalize these appointments. But all my candidates are dominations or stronger. I don’t have the data with which to select a principality right now, I _won’t_ pick one at random, and it would take most of the rest of the lunar phase to gather recommendations. So can we please - _what?_ ”

Mizgetari shuffles through its documents. “As a matter of fact,” it says, in a voice that makes her miss Zaphiel acutely, “I may have a candidate here in this other file - yes, here we go. Lieutenant Aziraphale, Principality. Did a spectacular job of guarding a door against large numbers of rebels, including some of much higher power levels, despite being grievously wounded. Even after the, ah, cessation of hostilities, he stayed with his door until the seraphim who’d ordered him to hold it took him to the infirmary. He volunteered for the Host immediately upon being discharged as fit for service.”

“There you go!” Gabriel slaps the metaphorical table and beams. “A dedicated, professional door holder! Just the thing!”

“Uh-huh. If this principality’s so impressive, why’s he only a lieutenant? How’d he come to be in your files?” Michael watches Mizgetari, observing the wing-flinch of uncertainty, the shifting eye of reluctance to say all it knew.

“Well, ah, it concerns a little, a little internal reorganization matter, nothing I was planning to disturb you with. His captain wants him reassigned, you see.”

“Why?”

“Well, he’s, it appears he’s a bit _quirky_.”

“Which means _what_?” Michael brings all her weariness and anxiety to get out of this conference room to bear on that “what.”

“Oh, nothing _bad_.” Mizgetari fluffs out its wings and presents the open file to her. She does not take it. “His platoon adores him. He was assigned to temporary duty as an instructor of instructors when the corps was issued bodies and did a fine job. Performs all his duties to the letter. Only, his Captain doesn’t think he’s a good fit in the company. Doesn’t have the right attitude, it says. Specifically, um - he’s one of the officers who necessitated explicit prohibition of cross-rank wing-grooming and similar intimate contacts. During the leave granted to rejoice about the Eden Project going live, instead of staying with his battalion for singing and team-building he hared off to teach half his platoon to eat fruit, almost letting them miss their call to sentry duty. There’s also a complaint in here about his bodily presentation not quite meeting standards, but he appears to have addressed that immediately it was brought to his attention. And - I’m pretty sure this is the kicker - rumor is that he’s admitted to feeling fear of another war and reluctance at the idea of smiting the foe; however, his platoon vigorously defends him from the implication of cowardice.”

Michael dismisses this last. “Well, we can’t have soldiers going around admitting to fear, but I’m not putting anybody out of the running based on a _rumor_. If no one’s gone to the trouble to confirm it, strike it from the file. What’s this _fruit_ business?”

“Oh,” says Jesodeth, suddenly brighter than it’s been since the War. _“Aziraphale_! I _thought_ the name sounded familiar! That was the angel the Akashic Records sent to Eden in various bodies to troubleshoot their system. He gave the plant teams good feedback about edibility, but not everyone liked how _much_ he ate. Jolly little chap, _very_ enthusiastic about humans. I doubt you’d find anybody more invested in Eden’s success outside of the relevant development teams. An excellent fit for the job, I’d think.”

“Hmm,” says Michael. “Sounds as if he’s one of those angels who does better in a smaller command structure. And this would oblige his Captain without any implication of blame or shame to rile up the principalities. In fact it ought to puff them up a bit, at no cost to anybody. I’d still rather have a throne there, but if we’ve _got_ to have a principality - all right, then.” She writes down the final sigil on her list, signs, shoves the document at Jesodeth for its signature, and rises.

“Now aren’t you glad I came to this meeting?” Gabriel grins.

Michael does not answer. She’s on her way to absorb gamma radiation and not think about Lucifer _or_ Zaphiel. _Alone._

\---

Aziraphale’s battalion in general, and his platoon in particular, are proud and delighted when he is appointed Guardian of the Eastern Gate of Eden. Aziraphale himself is conscious of the honor, but bewildered by it; until the Captain congratulates him and he realizes that the honor is a tacit admission from on high that he does not, really, belong in this company. 

Which doesn’t mean that there’s anything _wrong_ with him. The Captain is dissatisfied with him because he doesn’t fit in perfectly, and much as he Loves the angels over and under him, he can’t dispute this as a fact. A lateral move is probably the best outcome he could hope for, given all his little missteps. After all, he isn’t getting demoted and disgraced, like that poor power he’s heard of in another battalion, who lost his captaincy because he allowed a rogue demon to discorporate him. He will be serving alongside cherubim, in an important and prestigious position. More than that, he’ll get to see Eden in all its glory, and watch over the humans as they learn their way around the garden and begin to create things, and what could he desire more than that? The uneasiness in his rudimentary gut is entirely unreasonable. He’ll be fine once he’s at his new post.

So Aziraphale turns over his command and his sword to his successor with a smile, accepts the cheers of his battalion, allows himself to tear up a bit as he bids his platoon farewell, and flies to Eden, halfway around the world, to report to Michael herself in company with three cherubim, upon the wall of Eden. It looks even better than it did during his data gathering forays, its greenness a vivid contrast to the desert dunes around it.

Michael, even more grim and imposing close to than at the distances from which Aziraphale has previously seen her, hovers in front of the line of Guardians to address them. “Demonic activity has increased as implementation approaches, and we can be sure that they will miss no opportunity to attack the Human Project now as they did during the War. This desert is stocked with vicious animals that will tear apart the fragile bodies the demons are cobbling together, and such plants as grow here also have their deadly secrets. Inside of Eden, the atmosphere is perfectly calibrated for human comfort; in the desert, temperatures range from extreme cold at night to extreme heat during the day. And of course the Host is spread out over all the Earth, alert to every sign, ready to answer the call to arms. But you four, here, have the responsibility of being the front line, and the final line, of defense for these precious new creations. You have been specially selected for your suitability to the task, and I have every confidence that Eden and the humans are safe in your care.”

Aziraphale stands at attention, wondering _what_ vicious animals and deadly plant secrets hide in the folds of the desert, and whether they _can_ in fact be dangerous enough to deter demons, and _how_ exactly he will know a demon if he sees one, and _if_ he can be as good at guarding a gate as the cherubim, and whether he might have a chance to taste some of those absolutely _luscious_ fruits he smells on the breeze wafting out of the Garden, and whether someone somewhere might not have made a _terrible_ mistake in choosing him for this post.

Then God appears, ineffably full of Love for him, and his interior monolog stutters into silence. This is the first time he has looked God in the face since his creation, and he is overwhelmed as She says, to all of them at once and to each of them intimately: _Take these flaming swords and use them well in service of My creation, My beloved ones._

Aziraphale’s knees are weak with joy and Love and hope as he swears to serve Her and protect Her Humans, and then She is - not gone, because logically She is everywhere - but no longer manifesting directly at him. At them. Four Guardians, and he the least of them. Michael salutes. “To your stations,” she says. “Adam will receive the Breath of Life as soon as you are all in position.”

Fortunately, since Aziraphale can’t fly as fast as a cherub, the Eastern Gate, to which he is assigned, is also the closest one, and no one has to wait for him. He takes up his position, wishing he could face inward to watch the great event, but he knows his duty better than that. Someday he will have leisure, no doubt, and will be able to visit Liriel and Sabriel and witness the scene via the Records. He tries to content himself with that prospect, scanning the dunes and the perfect blue sky for any threat, hefting his flaming sword to accustom himself to its weight and balance. 

Which is when he recognizes it. The weight in his hand, the easy balanced motion through the air, are as well known to him as the sword he’s been drilling with since joining the Host. Better; because he knows how the shock of impact will transfer along the blade and up the grip and into his hands and arms, and the peculiar crawling sliding sensation it will make slicing the angelic/demonic equivalent of flesh and bone, how the fire of the blade will illuminate each assailant attacking in the dark long enough to select the most efficient place to strike to drive them back. He has not seen this sword since Liriel and Sabriel bore him off to the infirmary, leaving it amid the rubble and ash surrounding the Hall of the Akashic Records. 

He has not wanted to see this sword.

Aziraphale feels sick and his soul trembles and the scar in his true form aches, but his wings are steady, spread at full protection between the outside world and Eden; his legs are steady, braced against the stones of the Wall of Eden; his hands are steady, holding in readiness a flaming sword, all that is left Unfallen of a frightened former angel whose name he used to know.

Behind him, under the sweet green canopy of Eden, Adam receives the Breath of Life.

\--  
All Hell feels the shock, a jerk sideways like the snapping of a planet into orbit, as linear time takes hold upon the Earth. “This is it,” says Satan. “The humans are in play.”

“The Adversary hazz gone all out on the defenzzez,” reports Beelzebub. “Environmental hazzardzz, the Wall, aerial recon, infantry perimeter. Lotz of heavy hitterz. The lazzt eight zcout zzquadz we zzent up got zzmote before they could zzee the wallzz. They really don’t want uz mezzzing with Her petzz.”

“All the more reason we should mess with them,” says Satan. “I’d go myself, if I could.” He cannot. He has a whole team of analysts studying the wards that keep him away from Earth, while allowing everyone else who’s tried through, and they have made not one jot of progress. Crawly has had his work cut out spinning this fact to support, rather than undermine, his master’s wilful delusion that Everything is About Him. Satan surveys the gathering: Princes and Dukes, a few Presidents, some imps awaiting the commands of the masters who have claimed them. “So? Who volunteers to go up there and make some trouble?”

Eyes flicker all around the chamber, each demon looking at its neighbor. Satan’s face darkens. He opens his mouth.

“Yeah, I’ll go,” says Crawly, raising his head from his master’s shoulder. A titter runs through the room, the tension broken; Beelzebub takes a breath as if to speak; but Crawly, rippling around Satan’s arm, continues as if he is not joking; because he is not. His mouth is foul with the smell of sulphur; his eyes ache with Stygian darkness; his skin reverberates with every vibration of discontent in Hell; and he longs to see this creation “in Her image” for himself as much as he longs for sunshine and green smells. “I mean, makess ssensse, right? Ssiccing a pet on Her petss? The Hosst won’t know me from any other ssnake. Bet I can sslip right passt them.” He smiles, showing off his fangs, flicks his tongue in the way Satan finds charming. “C’mon. Pleassse? It’ll be _fun_.”

Satan chuckles, a rolling ominous sound. “All right, darling. Show this lot what you’re made of. And be sure to get the name of anybody that smites you, so we can wreak vengeance properly.” He holds his arm out and down, letting Crawly slide to the floor. 

“Sure thing,” says Crawly. “Ssee you around.” The Princes and Dukes and Presidents and imps make way for him as he slithers to the tunnel he’s made for himself, too narrow for any but the smallest imps to follow him into the maze of occult paths that will lead him to Eden. About half the demons in the room want him to run into a platoon of cherubim to smite him to a pulp. Crawly looks forward to disappointing them.

 _Idiots,_ he thinks. _Who cares about a wall or aerial recon? I’ve seen the blueprints for Eden, in Hastur’s old messenger bag. The angels don’t know how we get back and forth from Hell. I bet they haven’t given a thought to guarding against us coming up inside those walls. And even if they have, I’d rather be cut into as many pieces as Legion than listen to another rant from Himself about how pointless Humans are._

Behind him, Satan is speaking again. Crawly tunes him out as he slithers toward Eden to make trouble.

-30-


End file.
